Meta admits Muse's likeness to OpenClaw isn't a coincidence

Early users of Meta's Muse have spent weeks speculating that the assistant works so well because it is really OpenClaw underneath, wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package. On Tuesday, Meta said those comparisons are not entirely off-base.

What Meta said

Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), wrote on X that Muse was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw." He added that Muse itself was "built from scratch." Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said his team fell in love with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be "something like OpenClaw" that could scale to billions of people.

The thread that started it

Friedman was responding to a post that went viral among the AI crowd, in which Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, claimed that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies." Nanda's post included a conversation with Muse in which the agent said the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw's was not "a coincidence" but "a match." Others then compared the two assistants: one user pointed out that Muse also ships a SOUL.md file — the Markdown document that defines an agent's personality, tone, values and behavioural boundaries — and another said the files were not only named the same but almost identical in content.

Why it matters

OpenClaw is an open-source project, and its breakout success earlier this year was enough for OpenAI to hire its creator, Peter Steinberger. Asked why Muse copied the exact workspace file names and kept "nearly identical content" in SOUL.md, Friedman did not dispute it: "we thought that Peter got those things exactly right," he wrote, adding that Steinberger is a genius and that his harness was pioneering from the jump. His stated goal for Muse was to build something like OpenClaw that Meta could make safe, secure and easy to use at the scale of billions of people.

The debate lands as Muse has become a hit in its own right, recently reaching No. 1 on the U.S. App Store and outpacing ChatGPT's early mobile launch on comparable platforms. A Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman's statement and said the company had nothing to add.