Early adopters of Meta’s Muse speculate that the reason this AI works so well is because it has OpenClaw under the hood and is wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package. Mehta now insists that these comparisons are not completely off-base. According to an X post by Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Muse is “obviously heavily influenced by OpenClaw.”
However, he clarified that Muse itself was “built from the ground up.”
Friedman, a former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, said Meta’s team was obsessed with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be “like OpenClaw” that could scale to billions of people.
OpenClaw is an open source project, so it’s no wonder Meta looked to it for inspiration, especially considering its huge success. OpenAI poached developers earlier this year. But this speaks to Meta’s famous strategy of taking a promising product and copying its best features. This is the most infamous invention of Snapchat’s Stories format.
Friedman’s statement about X came in response to a post circulating among AI circles in which the AI app’s co-founder Anshu Nanda claimed that “Muse is literally OpenClaw for standards.”
Nanda’s X post included a conversation with Muse, in which the AI agent stated that the similarity between its system files and those belonging to OpenClaw was not just a “coincidence” but rather a “match.”
Soon, this thread (and X more broadly) began to blow up as others shared their own comparisons and findings. For example, someone pointed out that Muse also provides a SOUL.md file. This file is a plain text configuration file (written in a simple formatting language called Markdown) that defines the AI agent’s personality, communication style and tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise.
A third pointed out that not only were the names of the files the same between the two assistants; The content was almost exactly the same.
Following X’s post, Friedman also answered questions about why Muse copied the exact file names that made up the AI agent’s workspace and had “nearly identical content” in the SOUL.md file. Instead of refuting these claims, Friedman simply replied, “I thought Peter[Steinberger, OpenClaw creator]understood them correctly.”
“We built Muse from the ground up, but it’s definitely influenced heavily as a product by OpenClaw. After using OpenClaw in January and buying hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, many of us fell in love with using OpenClaw (and other individual agents),” Friedman said in X. (TechCrunch has corrected Friedman’s punctuation for readability)
“@sreipete (Peter Steinberger) was a genius and his harness was pioneering from Jump. I think many people were inspired by it. Our goal with Muse was to build something like OpenClaw that was safe, secure, easy to use, and scaled to billions of users,” he wrote.
The Muse app has been quite a hit so far, recently hitting #1 in the US App Store. Data shows that ChatGPT launches outperform ChatGPT launches when directly comparing platforms and market availability.
Asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s statement and said the company had nothing further to add.
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