Meta’s Nat Friedman Says Muse Was ‘Heavily Inspired’ by OpenClaw

Meta isn’t pretending its new personal agent came out of nowhere. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, said Monday evening that Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,” the open-source agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, while insisting Meta wrote Muse itself “from scratch.”

Friedman posted the replies on X after a thread by Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, went viral claiming that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.” Nanda had asked Muse about it, and the agent answered that the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw’s was not “a coincidence” but “a match,” TechCrunch reported. Other users then found that Muse carries a SOUL.md file, the plain-text Markdown file that sets an agent’s personality, tone, values, boundaries and expertise, and that its contents were almost the same as OpenClaw’s.

“Peter got those things exactly right”

Asked why Muse used the exact workspace file names and a near-identical SOUL.md, Friedman didn’t dispute it. “We thought that Peter got those things exactly right,” he replied. In his first post, he said that after trying OpenClaw in January he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the lab’s team, “and lots of us fell in love with using OpenClaw (and other personal agents).”

“@steipete is a genius, and his harness was pioneering from the jump,” Friedman wrote. “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.” The harness he means is the scaffolding around the model, which holds the instruction files, tool definitions and the loop that decides what the agent does next, The Next Web explained.

Both replies went up minutes apart as personal posts, not a company statement. Asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s posts and had nothing to add.

An open-source blueprint

Steinberger released OpenClaw under an open-source license, which makes the overlap a product question rather than a legal one, Quartz noted. The project, which launched as Clawdbot and was then renamed Moltbot, took off among developers in January, and OpenAI hired Steinberger earlier this year. TechCrunch tied the episode to a familiar Meta pattern of adopting rivals’ best ideas, most famously Snapchat’s Stories format.

So far the borrowing hasn’t hurt Muse. The app recently reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, and data indicates it is outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when platforms and availability are compared directly, according to TechCrunch. Meta has been building out the Muse line beyond the app, including a planned Muse Charm device.