The Pulse
Meta Says Muse Was Heavily Inspired by OpenClaw
Meta product chief Nat Friedman says the company built its Muse AI agent from scratch but took heavy product inspiration from OpenClaw. The admission follows user discoveries of matching workspace filenames and near-identical SOUL.md config
AI.info Team ·
“We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,” Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, wrote on X on September 22.
Friedman’s statement came after users compared Meta’s new personal AI agent with OpenClaw, an open-source project that has attracted a substantial following among early adopters. The comparisons went beyond similar behavior: users identified matching workspace filenames and nearly identical content in a file called SOUL.md, which defines an agent’s personality, tone, values, boundaries and areas of expertise.
Meta did not dispute those similarities. A company spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to Friedman’s statement and said Meta had nothing further to add.
Users Found More Than a Similar Interface
The dispute began with a post from Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, who described Muse as “LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.” Nanda shared a conversation in which Muse itself characterized the similarity between its system files and OpenClaw’s as “a match,” rather than a coincidence.
Other users then posted their own comparisons. One identified the shared SOUL.md filename. Another said the files’ contents were almost entirely the same, not merely similar in name. Friedman responded to a question about the matching filenames and near-identical file contents by saying, “we thought that Peter [Steinberger] got those things exactly right.”
Friedman’s comments distinguish between Muse’s implementation and its product design. He says Meta did not build Muse by taking OpenClaw’s code, but acknowledges that OpenClaw shaped the way Meta thought about the product.
Friedman Describes OpenClaw as a Product Reference
Friedman said he used OpenClaw in January and then bought hundreds of Mac minis for the Superintelligence Labs team. Many team members, he said, became enthusiastic users of OpenClaw and other personal agents.
“@steipete is a genius, and his harness was pioneering from the jump. I think a lot of people were inspired by it. Our goal with Muse was to build something like OpenClaw that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people,”
Nat Friedman, head of product, Meta Superintelligence Labs, quoted by TechCrunch
The reference to Steinberger concerns Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator. Friedman’s account presents OpenClaw as an example of an agent experience Meta wanted to adapt for a much larger audience, with more controls around privacy, safety and access.
Meta’s own launch materials describe Muse as a personal agent that operates through a dedicated virtual machine called Muse Secure VM. The company says Muse can use a browser, send email, book travel, manage longer-running tasks and request approval before sensitive actions such as purchases. Meta introduced the product in the United States on September 8 through iOS, Android, the web and WhatsApp. Meta’s announcement says the service is powered by its Muse Spark model.
Muse Arrives With Early Momentum
The OpenClaw comparison lands as Meta tries to establish Muse as a mainstream consumer product. TechCrunch reports that Muse recently reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store and is outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when the platforms and available markets are compared directly.
Meta’s product strategy depends on turning a technically demanding agent concept into something ordinary users can access through familiar interfaces. Muse is designed to work through messaging, while its virtual machine, approval prompts and audit trail are intended to limit what the agent can do without the user’s consent.
That approach gives Meta a clear distinction from OpenClaw’s original appeal among technically sophisticated users: Meta is packaging the agent experience inside a managed service and distributing it through its existing consumer platforms. Friedman’s description makes clear that OpenClaw supplied part of the product blueprint, even as Meta says Muse’s underlying system was built independently.
The Open Question Is Where Inspiration Ends
Friedman’s admission settles one part of the controversy. The resemblance between Muse and OpenClaw is intentional at the product level, rather than an accidental result of two teams arriving at the same design.
It does not establish that Meta copied OpenClaw’s code, and the sources reviewed for this report do not show that OpenClaw’s creator has made a legal claim against Meta. The confirmed similarities concern workspace structure, filenames and the contents of configuration files, while Meta maintains that Muse itself was built from scratch.
For Meta, the immediate issue is less about denying OpenClaw’s influence than defining the boundary between borrowing a successful design and reproducing its internal conventions. The company’s stated goal is to make an OpenClaw-like experience safe, easy to use and available to billions of people. Muse’s matching files show how directly that ambition grew from an existing project.