Meta says its Muse AI was inspired by OpenClaw, but built from scratch

Early users of Meta's AI product Muse guessed it might be built on the open-source project OpenClaw. Nat Friedman, product lead at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, responded on X that Muse was indeed deeply inspired by OpenClaw at the product level, but was built from scratch.

Friedman said the Meta team loved using OpenClaw and wanted to make Muse a similar product that could scale to billions of users. He mentioned buying hundreds of Mac minis for the team after using OpenClaw in January.

Users found that Muse and OpenClaw share files with the same names, such as SOUL.md, which defines an AI agent's personality, and the content is almost identical. Friedman did not deny these claims and praised OpenClaw developer Peter Steinberger for doing an excellent job.

Muse recently hit No. 1 on the US App Store free app chart, with early growth outpacing ChatGPT.