Meta product lead: Muse is 'heavily inspired' by OpenClaw, but built from scratch

Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), has responded to speculation that Meta's AI assistant Muse is essentially a repackaged version of the open-source project OpenClaw. In a post on X, Friedman acknowledged that Muse as a product was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," but insisted that Muse itself was "built from scratch."

Friedman said he started using OpenClaw in January 2026 and subsequently bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, many of whom "fell in love" with OpenClaw and other personal agents. He praised OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger as "a genius" and said his harness was "pioneering from the jump." Meta's goal, he said, was to build something like OpenClaw that could be made safe, secure, easy to use, and scaled to billions of people.

The exchange began when AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda posted on X that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies," including a conversation in which Muse said the similarity between its system files and OpenClaw's was not "a coincidence" but "a match." Other users pointed out that Muse also has a SOUL.md file, and that the file contents were nearly identical to OpenClaw's. Rather than disputing those claims, Friedman replied that "we thought that Peter got those things exactly right."

OpenClaw is an open-source project whose creator, Peter Steinberger, joined OpenAI earlier in 2026. Muse recently reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, with data suggesting it is outpacing ChatGPT's early mobile launch. A Meta spokesperson said the company had nothing to add beyond Friedman's statement.