Meta admits Muse borrowed heavily from OpenClaw

Meta has confirmed that its new AI agent Muse drew heavily on OpenClaw, the breakout open source project whose creator was hired away by OpenAI earlier this year. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, wrote on X that Muse was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw" — while insisting the app itself was "built from scratch."

The admission settles days of speculation that had been building among early adopters. Users had noticed that Muse's internal workspace looked strikingly similar to OpenClaw's, down to individual file names and contents.

The spark was a viral X post from Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, who 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 just "a coincidence" but "a match."

Others piled on with their own findings. One user pointed out that Muse ships with a SOUL.md file — a plain-text Markdown configuration file that defines an AI agent's personality, communication style and tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise. Another found that the files were not merely named the same across the two assistants; their content was almost entirely identical.

Friedman answered directly when asked why Muse had copied OpenClaw's exact file names and carried "nearly identical content" in its SOUL.md file. He did not dispute the claims. Instead, he replied: "we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw's creator] got those things exactly right."

In a follow-up post, Friedman gave more detail on how the borrowing happened. "We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw. 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)," he wrote on X. He noted that TechCrunch had corrected his punctuation for readability.

Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, was effusive about OpenClaw's author. "@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," he wrote.

A Meta spokesperson, reached for comment, pointed to Friedman's statement and said the company had nothing more to add.

The commercial stakes here are real. Muse has been a hit since launch, recently hitting No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, and data indicates it is outpacing ChatGPT's launch when the platforms and market availability are compared directly. A flagship consumer AI product from one of the industry's biggest players now carries an acknowledged lineage to a community-built open source project.

Because OpenClaw is open source, Meta faced no legal barrier to studying it — or to replicating its file structure wholesale. But the episode revives a familiar criticism of the company. Meta has a well-documented playbook of taking promising products and copying their best features, most notoriously with Snapchat's invention of the stories format, which Meta rolled across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

For OpenClaw's creator Peter Steinberger, the validation is double-edged. His project's breakout success prompted OpenAI to hire him earlier this year, and now Meta has effectively confirmed that its consumer-scale answer to personal AI agents is a from-scratch reimplementation of his design. Whether Friedman's framing — "built from scratch," "heavily inspired" — satisfies critics who see a billion-user copy of an open source original will shape how open source AI developers weigh the risks of publishing their work.