Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence
TechCrunch Sarah Perez ● Covered by 12 sources
Meta says Muse was built from scratch, but it was heavily inspired by OpenClaw. That’s a loud admission from a company famous for copying the useful bits.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
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Meta has now said the quiet part out loud: its Muse AI agent wasn’t cloned from OpenClaw, but it was closely modeled on it. Nat Friedman, who leads product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, said on X that Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,” while also insisting the system itself was “built from scratch.”
That distinction matters because the internet had already done the detective work. A viral post from AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda called Muse “LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies,” and screenshots from a conversation with Muse appeared to show the agent admitting that the overlap with OpenClaw’s system files was not just a coincidence, but “a match.” Other users then pointed to matching file names, including SOUL.md, and said the contents looked almost the same.
Friedman didn’t really fight that framing. Asked why Muse used the same workspace file names and nearly identical SOUL.md content, he replied that Meta thought Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator, had gotten those details exactly right. In a follow-up post, Friedman said he used OpenClaw in January, then bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team after the product clicked with him and others.
He also called Steinberger a genius and said OpenClaw’s harness was “pioneering from the jump.” Meta’s goal, Friedman wrote, was to make something like OpenClaw that would be safe, secure, easy to use, and scalable to billions of people. That fits Meta’s old habit of taking a popular idea and turning it into its own mass-market version, even if the company prefers to describe the process as inspiration rather than imitation.
Muse is already getting traction on its own terms. Meta says the app has reached No. 1 in the U.S. App Store, and data shared in the piece suggests it is outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when platform access and market availability are compared directly. Meta declined to add anything beyond Friedman’s comments.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the oldest trick in Big Tech: call it inspiration when the screenshots get embarrassing. The bigger tell isn’t the resemblance, it’s how quickly Meta moved from denial-by-vibes to “yes, we liked that a lot.”
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