Meta admits Muse's likeness to OpenClaw isn't a coincidence
Meta acknowledges its AI product Muse was heavily inspired by OpenClaw, praising creator Peter Steinberger while insisting it was built from scratch.Summary
Meta has acknowledged that its AI product Muse was heavily inspired by OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent project. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, confirmed in an X post that while Muse was "built from scratch," it was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw." The admission came after users discovered striking similarities between the two — including identical file names, nearly identical SOUL.md configuration files defining personality and behavior, and matching system files. AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda went viral claiming "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies." Friedman praised OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger as "a genius" whose harness was "pioneering from the jump," saying Meta's team fell in love with OpenClaw and wanted to build something similar that could scale to billions. The Muse app has reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, reportedly outpacing ChatGPT's launch. The episode highlights Meta's well-known strategy of taking promising products and copying their best features — a playbook most infamously applied to Snapchat's stories format.
(Source：TechCrunch)