Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence

Early adopters of Meta’s Muse have been speculating that the reason the AI works so well is because it’s OpenClaw under the hood, wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package. Meta now says those comparisons aren’t entirely off-base. According to an X post by Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw.”

However, he clarified that Muse itself was “built from scratch.”

Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said that the team at Meta had fallen in love with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be “something like OpenClaw” that could be scaled to billions of people.

Because OpenClaw is an open source project, it wouldn’t be surprising that Meta looked to it for inspiration, especially given its breakout success, which prompted OpenAI to snatch up its creator earlier this year. However, it speaks to Meta’s well-known playbook that involves taking promising products, then copying their best features — something it did most notoriously with Snapchat’s invention of the stories format.

Friedman’s statement on X was made in response to a post that had gone viral among the AI crowd, where Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, claimed that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.”

Nanda’s X post had included a conversation with Muse, where the AI agent said that the similarity between its own system files and those belonging to OpenClaw was not just “a coincidence” but rather “a match.”

Soon, this thread (and X more broadly) began blowing up as others shared their own comparisons and findings. For instance, one person pointed out that Muse also had a SOUL.md file, the plain text configuration file (written in a simple formatting language called Markdown) that defines an AI agent’s personality, communication style and tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise.

View Bio