Meta says Muse was built from scratch but heavily inspired by OpenClaw

For a week, people opening Muse's internals kept finding OpenClaw. The filenames matched. The personality file matched. Then Nat Friedman, product head at Meta Superintelligence Labs, confirmed the resemblance was by design.

Users compared the two agents and found the same core workspace names — SOUL.md, memory, tools — and near-identical lines in the document that sets tone and behavior, including "Be genuinely helpful, not performatively helpful." AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda posted that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies." In a chat he shared, Muse called the overlap "a match," not "a coincidence." On Reddit, at least one person argued Muse was a wrapper on OpenClaw, security problems and all.

Friedman replied on X that Muse was "built from scratch" but "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw." After he used OpenClaw in January, he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the lab, and "lots of us fell in love with using OpenClaw." Asked why Muse copied the workspace names and nearly identical SOUL.md content, he did not dispute it: "we thought that Peter [Steinberger] got those things exactly right."

Steinberger created OpenClaw; OpenAI hired him in February. Friedman called him "a genius" and the harness "pioneering from the jump." Meta's goal, he wrote, was "something like OpenClaw that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people." A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch the company had nothing to add beyond Friedman's post. Meta has denied that Muse is a wrapper.

OpenClaw is open source. Nobody in the reporting has established a code-theft claim. The live dispute is originality and trust: the personal agent Meta wants in front of billions is openly copying OpenClaw's harness conventions — the files that define personality, memory, and tools — after the project's author went to a rival. Friedman is not hiding the inspiration. He is betting Meta can make that shape safe enough to scale.

Read Hayden Field in The Verge and Sarah Perez at TechCrunch for the file-level comparisons and Friedman's full replies.

Sources