Meta confirms Muse was heavily inspired by open source AI agent OpenClaw, including near-identical files
Nat Friedman, Meta’s MSL product head, acknowledged in a September 2026 X post that Muse closely mirrors OpenClaw, including near-identical filenames and SOUL.md content. He said Meta aims to make the agent safe, secure, and scalable to billions.
Meta has acknowledged that its Muse AI assistant was “heavily inspired” by OpenClaw, an open source AI agent — including sharing nearly identical workspace filenames and file content. The admission came in a September 2026 X post from Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL) and former GitHub CEO, who joined Meta alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
Friedman’s statement followed a viral post by AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda, who claimed that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies” and shared a conversation in which Muse itself said the similarity between its system files and OpenClaw’s was not “a coincidence” but rather “a match.” Others in the thread noted that both assistants contained a file called SOUL.md — a plain text configuration file defining an AI agent’s personality, communication style, values, and behavioral boundaries — and that the content of those files was “almost entirely the same.”
Friedman did not dispute those findings. When asked why Muse had copied OpenClaw’s exact file names and near-identical SOUL.md content, he replied that “we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator] got those things exactly right.” He added that after using OpenClaw in January, he purchased hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and that many team members “fell in love” with the product. Meta’s goal, he said, was to build something like OpenClaw that could be “made safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people.”
Friedman maintained that Muse was nonetheless “built from scratch.” A Meta spokesperson pointed to his statement and said the company had nothing further to add.
Because OpenClaw is open source, Meta’s use of it as a reference is not necessarily a legal issue, though the extent of the similarities may raise questions about the line between inspiration and copying. OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, was described by Friedman as “a genius” whose “harness was pioneering from the jump.” OpenAI acquired Steinberger earlier in 2026 following OpenClaw’s breakout success.
Muse has performed strongly since launch, reaching No. 1 on the U.S. App Store and outpacing ChatGPT’s launch trajectory when compared on equivalent platforms and market availability.