Meta Confirms Muse Was Heavily Inspired by OpenClaw, but Built From Scratch

Meta has acknowledged that its Muse AI was strongly influenced by OpenClaw, following speculation from early users that the two systems were nearly identical under the hood.

Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, said on X that Muse was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," though he insisted it was "built from scratch."

The discussion began when AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda posted that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies," sharing a conversation in which Muse described the similarity between its system files and OpenClaw's as "a match" rather than "a coincidence." Others noted that Muse also uses a SOUL.md file, and that the contents of the two assistants' files are nearly identical.

Asked why Muse copied the exact file names and near-identical content, Friedman did not dispute the claims, replying that the team thought OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger "got those things exactly right." He said the MSL team fell in love with OpenClaw after he used it in January and bought hundreds of Mac minis for the team, adding that the goal was to build something like OpenClaw that could be made safe, secure, easy to use, and scaled to billions of people.

A Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman's statement and said the company had nothing more to add. Muse recently hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store.