Meta’s head of product at Superintelligence Labs said Muse was heavily inspired by OpenClaw, while adding that the app was built from scratch.. Nat Friedman made the comments in posts on X after early users and developers compared Muse’s structure and behavior with OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent project created by Peter Steinberger..
Friedman said the Meta team had “fallen in love” with OpenClaw after using it and wanted to build “something like OpenClaw” that could be made safe, secure, easy to use and scalable to billions of people.. “We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,” Friedman wrote on X.
He added that after using OpenClaw in January, he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team.. The discussion accelerated after Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, wrote in a viral X post that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.” Nanda included a conversation with Muse in which the agent said similarities between its system files and OpenClaw’s were “not just a coincidence” but “a match.”.
Users then posted further comparisons, including claims that Muse contained a SOUL.md file, a plain-text configuration file used to define an AI agent’s personality, tone, values, boundaries and expertise.. Others said the overlap went beyond file names and extended to the content itself.
When asked on X why Muse used the same file names and had “nearly identical content” in its SOUL.md file, Friedman did not dispute the similarity.. “We thought that Peter got those things exactly right,” Friedman wrote, referring to Steinberger. He also called Steinberger “a genius” and said OpenClaw’s harness was “pioneering from the jump.”.
Muse has recently reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store.
Data cited in the report said the app is outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when platform and market availability are compared directly.. A Meta spokesperson referred further questions to Friedman’s posts and said the company had nothing more to add.. Featured image credit.
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