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Meta Says Muse Was 'Heavily Inspired' by OpenClaw as File Similarities Surface

Meta's Nat Friedman said the company's Muse AI assistant was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," after users pointed to shared file names and near-identical configuration content. He said Muse was built from scratch and the comparison is not a coincidence.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-23 05:13

Early adopters of Muse had speculated that the assistant performs as well as it does because it is OpenClaw underneath, packaged in a more consumer-friendly form. Friedman said Muse itself was "built from scratch." He also said his team at Meta had become enthusiastic users of OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be "something like OpenClaw" that could be scaled to billions of people.

Friedman's post answered a thread that had spread among AI developers. Ansh Nanda, a co-founder of an AI app, wrote that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies" and included a conversation in which the Muse agent described the similarity between its own system files and those belonging to OpenClaw as not just "a coincidence" but "a match."

Others in the thread pointed out that Muse also has a SOUL.md file, the plain-text Markdown configuration file that defines an AI agent's personality, communication style and tone, values, behavioral boundaries and expertise. A third participant said the two assistants' files did not merely share names; their content was almost entirely the same.

Asked why Muse had copied the exact file names that make up the agent's workspace, and why its SOUL.md file carried "nearly identical content," Friedman did not dispute the claim. He replied that "we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw's creator] got those things exactly right."

"We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," Friedman wrote. He said that after he used OpenClaw in January, he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and that many of his colleagues fell in love with using OpenClaw and other personal agents. "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," he wrote, calling Steinberger "a genius" whose harness "was pioneering from the jump."

Friedman is the former chief executive of GitHub and joined Meta last year alongside the company's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang. OpenClaw is an open-source project whose breakout success led OpenAI to hire its creator earlier this year. Meta has a long record of adopting features popularized by rivals, most famously the stories format invented by Snapchat.

Muse has drawn strong early demand. It recently reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, and data comparing the platforms and their market availability directly indicates the app is outpacing the launch of ChatGPT, according to TechCrunch.

A Meta spokesperson referred to Friedman's statement and said the company had nothing to add beyond it.