Hajra Naz
Early users of Meta’s Muse started noticing something. They began speculating that Muse works so well because it’s actually OpenClaw underneath. Just dressed up in a friendlier, more consumer-facing shell. Meta isn’t denying it anymore. Nat Friedman, who heads product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), addressed this directly in an X post. He said Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw.”
But he pushed back on one point. Muse itself, he said, was “built from scratch.”
Friedman used to run GitHub. He joined Meta last year, alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang. According to Friedman, the team at Meta fell hard for OpenClaw. They wanted Muse to feel like OpenClaw, but built for scale — something that could reach billions of users.
OpenClaw is open source. So it’s not shocking that Meta drew inspiration from it. The project had a breakout moment big enough that OpenAI hired its creator earlier this year. Still, this fits a pattern people already associate with Meta. Find something promising, then absorb its best ideas. The most famous example remains Snapchat’s Stories format, which Meta replicated across its own apps.
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Friedman’s comment didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a reply to a post that had already gone viral in AI circles. Ansh Nanda, a co-founder of an AI app, claimed flatly that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.”
Nanda backed this up with a screenshot. He’d asked Muse itself about the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw’s. The AI reportedly responded that it wasn’t “a coincidence.” It called it “a match.”
From there, things escalated fast. The thread took off, and X users started digging up their own side-by-side comparisons. One user pointed out that Muse has a SOUL.md file too. That’s a plain-text config file, written in Markdown, that shapes an AI agent’s personality, tone, values, boundaries, and areas of expertise. OpenClaw has the same file.
Then someone else went further. A third post noted the file names weren’t just identical. The actual content inside them was nearly word-for-word the same.
Someone eventually asked Friedman directly. Why did Muse copy the exact file structure, right down to matching file names? And why was the SOUL.md content nearly identical? Friedman didn’t deny any of it. His answer was simple: “We thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator] got those things exactly right.”
He elaborated further on X. “We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,” he wrote. “After I used OpenClaw in January, I bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and lots of us fell in love with using OpenClaw (and other personal agents).” (TechCrunch cleaned up his punctuation slightly for readability.)
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He kept going. “@steipete [Peter Steinberger] is a genius, and his harness was pioneering from the jump. I think a lot of people were inspired by it,” Friedman said. “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.”
Meanwhile, Muse is doing well commercially. It recently climbed to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. And the numbers back up the hype — it’s reportedly outpacing ChatGPT’s early launch trajectory when you compare similar platforms and market conditions.
