Meta's head of product at its Superintelligence Labs, Nat Friedman, confirmed on September 22, 2026 that the company's new Muse assistant was modeled on OpenClaw, the open-source personal-agent project built by Peter Steinberger. Friedman said Muse was 'built from scratch' but 'definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,' addressing a viral thread on X that documented near-identical configuration files between the two systems. Muse currently sits at No. 1 on the U.S. App Store and is outpacing ChatGPT's early launch trajectory.
The admission came in response to a post from Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, who published a conversation with Muse in which the assistant itself said the similarity between its system files and OpenClaw's was not 'a coincidence' but 'a match.' Other users then piled on with side-by-side comparisons. One pointed out that Muse ships with a SOUL.md file — a Markdown-formatted configuration that defines an AI agent's personality, tone, values, and behavioral boundaries — using the same name OpenClaw uses.
A further comparison found that the file contents were also nearly identical, not just the naming convention. Asked directly why Muse had copied the exact file names and near-identical SOUL.md contents, Friedman did not dispute the finding.
“Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.”— Ansh Nanda, AI app co-founder
Key facts
- 01Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, said Muse was 'definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw' but 'built from scratch.'
- 02Users found Muse and OpenClaw share file names including a SOUL.md configuration file with nearly identical content.
- 03Muse hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store and is outpacing ChatGPT's launch trajectory on comparable platforms.
- 04OpenAI acquired OpenClaw's creator Peter Steinberger earlier in 2026 following the project's breakout success.
- 05Friedman bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team after using OpenClaw in January 2026.
Instead, he replied that 'we thought that Peter got those things exactly right.' Friedman, the former GitHub CEO, joined Meta in 2025 alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang as part of the company's push to stand up Superintelligence Labs.
OpenClaw itself is open source, which makes the inspiration legally uncomplicated. The project became a breakout hit earlier in 2026, prompting OpenAI to acquire its creator, Steinberger, in a talent-focused deal.
Friedman's explanation traced the lineage back to his own use of the tool in January 2026, after which he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team so engineers could run local personal agents.
“We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw. After I used OpenClaw in January, I bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and lots of us fell in love with using OpenClaw (and other personal agents)”— Nat Friedman, Head of product, Meta Superintelligence Labs
He credited Steinberger directly, calling him 'a genius' and describing the OpenClaw harness as 'pioneering from the jump.' Friedman framed Meta's goal as taking the OpenClaw design pattern and hardening it for consumer scale — safe, secure, easy to use, and deliverable to billions of people. That is a step OpenClaw's original creator, targeting developers, never had to solve for.
The episode fits a familiar Meta playbook: identify a promising product, absorb its best design decisions, and rebuild them for a much larger distribution surface. The most-cited precedent is Meta's adoption of Snapchat's stories format, which it ported across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The Muse case is a lighter version — OpenClaw is open source, not a competitor product — but the copying was direct enough that end users could reverse-engineer it from filenames alone.
Reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman's statements and said the company had nothing more to add. Steinberger has not publicly objected; Friedman's posts explicitly credit him and his design work.
For Meta, the strategic prize is worth the awkwardness. Muse's App Store ranking and its pace against ChatGPT's launch curve, which we covered earlier this week using Apptopia data, suggest the company has found a consumer wedge into the personal-agent category — a market currently dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Buying hundreds of Mac minis to let engineers live in OpenClaw before shipping a look-alike is an unusually candid description of how a trillion-dollar company clones an indie tool. It is also, based on the download numbers, working.
Working on something we should cover, or seeing a story we missed? Send leads, documents, or feedback to hello@aichatdaily.com. For sensitive tips, see our secure tips page for Signal and PGP options.
Spotted an error? Email hello@aichatdaily.com with the URL and the issue, or read our full corrections policy.
