Meta admits Muse was 'heavily inspired' by OpenClaw
Original: Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence
Why This Matters
Meta's Muse is targeting billions of users; its design choices will shape mainstream AI agent behavior at scale.
Meta's Nat Friedman confirmed on X that Muse, the company's AI assistant, was 'definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,' an open-source AI agent. While Friedman insists Muse was 'built from scratch,' users found nearly identical file names and SOUL.md content shared between the two systems.
Early Muse users noticed the AI felt suspiciously similar to OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent whose creator was later acquired by OpenAI. Their suspicions were confirmed when AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda posted a viral X thread showing that Muse itself, in conversation, described its resemblance to OpenClaw not as 'a coincidence' but as 'a match.' Users piled on, identifying shared internal file structures and a SOUL.md configuration file — which defines an agent's personality, tone, and behavioral limits — with nearly identical content between both products. Nat Friedman, Meta's head of product at its Superintelligence Labs and former GitHub CEO, responded directly on X. He confirmed the inspiration was intentional: '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.' When pressed on why file names and SOUL.md content were near-identical rather than just conceptually similar, Friedman didn't dispute the claim — he said simply that OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger 'got those things exactly right.' Meta's history here matters. The company has a well-documented pattern of cloning successful products, most famously lifting Snapchat's Stories format. OpenClaw being open-source makes borrowing legally defensible, but the specificity of the copying — down to config file names — raises questions about where inspiration ends.