Meta Admits Muse Was Heavily Inspired By OpenClaw, Reaches No. 1 On U.S. App Store

Meta has confirmed what early adopters suspected: its breakout AI agent Meta Muse was heavily inspired by OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent that became a developer favorite earlier this year. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former GitHub CEO, addressed weeks of speculation in X posts on Monday evening, stating that Muse was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw" while maintaining the app was built from scratch1

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Meta Superintelligence Labs Bought Hundreds Of Mac Minis After Discovering OpenClaw

Friedman revealed that after using OpenClaw in January, he purchased hundreds of Mac minis for the Meta Superintelligence Labs team. "Lots of us fell in love with using OpenClaw (and other personal agents)," he wrote1

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. The team's goal was to build something like OpenClaw that could be made safe, secure, easy to use, and scalable to billions of people4

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Friedman, who joined Meta last year alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, called Peter Steinberger—OpenClaw's creator—"a genius" and described his harness as "pioneering from the jump"1

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. The harness refers to the scaffolding around a model that holds instruction files, tool definitions, and the loop deciding what the AI agent does next.

Users Discovered Identical File Structures Between Meta Muse And OpenClaw

The controversy erupted after Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, posted on X that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies." Nanda shared a conversation where Muse itself acknowledged that similarities between its system files and OpenClaw's were "not just a coincidence" but "a match"1

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Users quickly found that Muse contained a SOUL.md file—the plain text configuration file that defines an AI agent's personality, communication style, tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise. Further investigation revealed that not only were file names identical between the two personal AI agents, but their content was nearly the same1

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When asked directly why Muse copied the exact file names and had "nearly identical content" in the SOUL.md file, Friedman didn't dispute the claims. Instead, he simply stated: "we thought that Peter got those things exactly right"1

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Meta Muse Hits No. 1 On U.S. App Store With Over 500,000 Users

Despite the controversy, Meta Muse has become a hit. The app recently reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, and data indicates it's outpacing ChatGPT's launch when platforms and market availability are compared directly1

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. More than 500,000 people tried the consumer-friendly version in roughly its first week, including over 250,000 daily users who submitted upwards of two million prompts2

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. Meta shares jumped 11% on Monday following the app's reception, marking the biggest one-day gain since April 202

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Meta describes Muse as an AI 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 announced, and also works inside WhatsApp. The app is free within limits, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 per month2

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OpenClaw's Open-Source License Allows Replication

Peter Steinberger published OpenClaw under an open-source license, making the file similarities a product question rather than a legal one. The open-source AI agent became a hit among developers in January after going through two previous names—Clawdbot and then Moltbot. Steinberger joined OpenAI in February2

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What the license doesn't settle is the product differentiation question. Meta reviews and approves connectors that plug outside services into Muse and decides which ones get featured, while OpenClaw has no gatekeeper because nobody owns the distribution2

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. This approach mirrors Meta's well-known playbook of adopting promising features from competitors—most notably copying Snapchat's Stories format in August 20161

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Friedman's statements came as replies on X rather than as an official company statement. When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman's posts and said the company had nothing more to add1

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. The acknowledgment raises questions about how tech giants leverage open-source projects to build scalable AI tools while maintaining they've created something new.