Meta confirms OpenClaw inspired the Muse AI agent
Meta acknowledges OpenClaw’s influence on Muse
Meta has acknowledged that its Muse AI agent was heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw, following online comparisons between the two tools. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, said Muse was built from scratch, while confirming that the product direction drew substantially on the open-source AI agent project.
The comments followed a viral X post by AI application co-founder Ansh Nanda, who described Muse as “LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.” Users had highlighted similarities in the assistants’ workspace files, including a SOUL.md configuration file. That plain-text Markdown file defines an agent’s personality, communication style, tone, values, behavioural boundaries and areas of expertise.
Friedman did not dispute reports that Muse and OpenClaw used the same file names and that their SOUL.md files had nearly identical content. He responded that Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator, had “got those things exactly right.” Meta said it had no further comment beyond Friedman’s statement.
From personal agent to mass-market service
Friedman said he used OpenClaw in January and then bought hundreds of Mac minis for the Meta Superintelligence Labs team. He said many members of the group became enthusiastic users of OpenClaw and other personal agents, and that Muse was intended to be something like OpenClaw that could be made safe, secure, easy to use and able to scale to billions of people.
The acknowledgement gives added context to Meta’s rollout of Meta’s Muse agent for everyday tasks, which positioned the service as an assistant for everyday tasks. In the new statement, Meta distinguishes between building Muse’s underlying product from scratch and adopting design choices that OpenClaw had established.
Why configuration files became a focal point
The discussion focused on more than a broad resemblance between two chat interfaces. Users noted matching workspace-file names and similarities in their contents. In agent-based software, those files can express how an assistant is expected to communicate, what boundaries govern its behaviour and what working context it receives.
OpenClaw’s open-source status makes it available for inspection and use by others. The project had also gained enough attention for OpenAI to acquire its creator earlier this year. Friedman called Steinberger’s harness pioneering and said many people had been inspired by it.
Muse has already reached No. 1 on the US App Store. Data cited in the report indicates that, when platform and market availability are compared directly, its launch is outpacing ChatGPT’s. For businesses evaluating AI agents, Meta’s statement is a reminder to examine configuration, security and deployment characteristics alongside the consumer-facing experience.