Meta admits its Muse AI was heavily inspired by OpenClaw
Meta's Nat Friedman has acknowledged that the company's Muse AI assistant was heavily inspired by the open-source project OpenClaw, though built independently, after users noticed the two shared nearly identical system files.
Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), has confirmed on X that Meta's Muse AI assistant was "definitely heavily inspired" by OpenClaw, the popular open-source AI agent created by Peter Steinberger. Friedman clarified that Muse itself was built from scratch rather than copied outright.
The admission followed a viral X post from AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda, who claimed Muse was "literally OpenClaw for normies." Nanda had shared a conversation with Muse itself, in which the AI agent stated that the resemblance between its own system files and OpenClaw's was not a coincidence but a match.
Nearly identical files
Other users pointed out that Muse, like OpenClaw, uses a SOUL.md file — a plain-text Markdown configuration file that defines an AI agent's personality, communication style, values and behavioral boundaries. Some noted that the files weren't just named the same across both assistants; their actual content was nearly identical as well.
Asked why Muse had copied the exact file names and produced nearly identical SOUL.md content, Friedman replied that the team believed Steinberger "got those things exactly right."
Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said that after using OpenClaw in January he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and many staffers fell in love with using OpenClaw and similar personal agents. He said the goal with Muse was to build something similar that could be made safe, secure and scalable to billions of users.
Muse has performed well since launch, recently reaching No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, with data suggesting it is outpacing ChatGPT's original launch when comparing platform and market availability. A Meta spokesperson, when reached for comment, pointed to Friedman's statement and said the company had nothing further to add.
