Credit: gguy via Shutterstock We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw. Nat Friedman posted that on X on Monday evening. The head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs was answering a fortnight of speculation about Meta’s new personal agent, and why it felt so familiar to anyone who had used the open source one. Sarah Perez reported the exchange for TechCrunch.
Early adopters had spent days comparing Muse’s internal files with OpenClaw’s, and they kept finding more than a family resemblance. What users found The thread that set it off came from Ansh Nanda, who cofounded an AI app company. He wrote that Muse is OpenClaw for normies, and that it is actually just OpenClaw. Nanda had put the question to Muse itself and posted the reply.
The agent said the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw’s was not a coincidence but a match. Others piled in. One noted that Muse carries a SOUL.md file, the plain text configuration file that sets an agent’s personality, tone, values, boundaries and areas of expertise. Another checked the contents rather than the names, and found those almost entirely the same too.
Friedman’s answer Friedman set out the history in his first reply. He used OpenClaw in January, then bought hundreds of Mac minis for the Superintelligence Labs team, and a lot of them fell in love with it. He called Steinberger a genius and his harness pioneering from the start. The goal with Muse, he wrote, was to build something like OpenClaw that Meta could make safe, secure, easy to use, and able to scale to billions of people.
Nanda came back with a narrower question. If Muse was built from scratch, why copy the exact file names for the workspace, and why near identical content in SOUL.md. Was that intentional, or an artefact of inspiration? Friedman did not dispute the premise.
He answered that the team thought Peter had got those things exactly right. Both answers went up on Monday evening, minutes apart, as replies rather than as a company statement. Meta published nothing of its own, and TechCrunch reported the exchange the following day. Who Steinberger is Steinberger, an Austrian developer, wrote OpenClaw and released it as open source.
It became a hit among developers in January and spread well past them. The project went through two names before that one, launching as Clawdbot and then Moltbot. The harness Friedman praised is the scaffolding around a model rather than the model itself. It holds the instruction files, the tool definitions and the loop that decides what the agent does next.
SOUL.md is one of those files. We reported in February that he joined OpenAI. In May we covered the token bill his own project ran up. His framework keeps turning up inside other companies’ products.
Last Thursday we wrote about Google Home opening to third party agents, OpenClaw among them. The licence allows it Steinberger published OpenClaw under an open source licence, which makes the file similarities a product question rather than a legal one. Open source exists so that other people can read the code and build on it. Friedman ran GitHub as chief executive before joining Meta last year, alongside Alexandr Wang, the company’s chief AI officer.
He knows the norms of the thing he is describing. What the licence does not settle is the product question underneath. Meta has told developers it will review and approve the connectors that plug outside services into Muse, and it decides which ones get featured. OpenClaw has no gatekeeper, because nobody owns the distribution.
Meta has done this before The company has a long record of adopting features that worked somewhere else. The clearest case is Stories. Snapchat launched the format in 2013, and Instagram shipped its own version in August 2016. Zuckerberg addressed the pattern at a US antitrust hearing in 2020, where he acknowledged that Meta had copied its competitors.
What Muse asks for Meta describes Muse as an agent that books appointments, fills in forms, handles customer service, makes purchases, generates images and creates documents. It runs on macOS, with no Windows version so far, and it also works inside WhatsApp. To do any of that it needs access. Users authenticate it to their email, calendar, messaging and social accounts, and grant it macOS permissions covering files, the microphone, the camera and location.
The app is limited to users aged 18 and over. It is free within limits, and Meta sells more capacity at $20 and $100 a month. Two weeks of Muse Meta launched Muse on 8 September and it reached number one on the US App Store. Jyoti Mann reported for The Information that more than 500,000 people tried it in roughly its first week, including more than 250,000 daily users, who submitted upwards of two million prompts.
Those figures come from internal Meta data the publication says it viewed. Meta shares jumped 11% on Monday on the app’s reception, the biggest one day gain since April 2025. Not everything has gone Meta’s way. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site on Sunday, saying the agent does not identify itself and breaks its conditions of use.
Security researcher Patrick Wardle then disclosed a zero day in the Mac app. Meta issued what it called a hotfix and said the practical risk to users was low. What Meta said TechCrunch asked the company for comment. A spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s post and said Meta had nothing to add beyond it.
Wang opened the connector platform to outside developers on Friday, and Shopify and Stripe have both wired their payment systems into the agent. That layer is the part Meta is building for itself, and it is the part the project it borrowed from does not have.
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