Meta has confirmed that its new AI agent app, Muse, was heavily inspired by OpenClaw, the open source personal AI agent project.

Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta‘s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), said on X that Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,” while also clarifying that Muse itself was “built from scratch.

” The confirmation came after early adopters noticed strong similarities between the two assistants, including matching file names and nearly identical content in the SOUL.

md file, a plain text configuration file that defines an AI agent’s personality, communication style, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise.

Friedman responded to those comparisons by saying that the team thought OpenClaw‘s creator, Peter Steinberger, “got those things exactly right.

” He also explained that after using OpenClaw in January, he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and many team members fell in love with using OpenClaw and other personal agents.

Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Meta‘s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said the goal with Muse was to build something like OpenClaw that could be made safe, secure, easy to use, and scaled to billions of people.

The discussion began when Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, posted a viral claim that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies,” including a conversation in which Muse said the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw‘s was not just “a coincidence” but rather “a match.

” Others then shared comparisons, noting that Muse also had a SOUL.md file and that the files’ content was almost entirely the same.

Meta‘s acknowledgment fits its well-known playbook of taking promising products and copying their best features, as it did with Snapchat’s stories format.

Muse has been a hit so far, recently reaching No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, and data indicates it is outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when platforms and market availability are compared directly.

A Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s statement and said the company had nothing more to add.