Meta Says Muse Was Heavily Inspired by OpenClaw, But Built From Scratch
Meta's Muse was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, said on Sept. 22. Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, added that Muse was "built from scratch" TechCrunch.
Friedman said Meta's goal was "to build something like OpenClaw that could be made safe, secure, easy to use and scaled to billions of people." The statement acknowledges the inspiration while claiming separate implementation, with safety and scale as the difference.
The timeline goes back to January. Friedman said that after he tried OpenClaw in January, he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team. MSL operates under Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
He did not dispute the details. When asked why Muse copied OpenClaw's exact workspace file names and carried nearly identical SOUL.md content, Friedman said Meta thought creator Peter Steinberger "got those things exactly right."
SOUL.md is a plain-text file, written in Markdown, that sets how an AI agent behaves. It covers personality, communication style and tone, values, limits, and expertise. It stores the agent's identity outside the model itself, so developers can read it, version it, and edit it without retraining.
OpenClaw is an open-source project created by Steinberger. Steinberger has said he started work on an open personal AI agent because existing assistants felt too limited. He has also said he is joining OpenAI to work on "bringing agents to everyone," and that OpenClaw will move to a foundation and remain open and independent.
Muse arrives with related models already public. Muse Spark can handle text and images at once, a method often called multimodal. It supports tool-use, or calling outside software, visual chain of thought, or working step by step through what it sees, and multi-agent orchestration, or coordinating several AI helpers. Muse Spark 1.1 is built for these agent tasks and is available on Meta Model API. Meta built Muse Code to run Muse Spark 1.2. Separately, Muse Glimmer is an open-weight model, meaning its files are publicly available to download and run, built for local agents, with OpenClaw as the reference harness, or standard test setup Meta Developers.
On distribution, Muse started quickly. In the U.S. and Canada, Meta's AI agent Muse recorded more downloads and daily active users than ChatGPT did during the same early-launch period TechCrunch.
The broader context here is useful for builders. Open-source agent projects have become the place where practical ideas get tested. File layouts, memory habits, permission rules, and personality files like SOUL.md are copied, broken, and fixed in public at a speed that is hard for any single company to match. A commercial lab can then keep those interface patterns while rebuilding the underlying system for policy checks, sandboxing, updates, and measurement.
Looking at what this means for developers, the practical question is not whether file names match. It is what survives the move from enthusiast tool to billion-user product. Running locally on hundreds of Mac minis favors tinkering and control. Managed online models, central safety rules, and one-click install favor trust and lower support costs.
In my view, that tradeoff explains why Friedman is willing to be candid. Admitting product inspiration costs little when the technical claim is separate code built for safety and scale. For the open ecosystem, the result is still useful. Design choices pioneered in OpenClaw, from workspace structure to a Markdown identity file, are now proven at larger scale. If Meta keeps Glimmer open-weight and keeps OpenClaw as a reference harness, independent developers keep a way to build without taking the full Meta app.
Watching my kids grow up, I saw the shift from files and folders you could see to apps that hid the filesystem. Agents feel like a partial return. The state of the system is readable again, in text files. That readability is worth preserving, even as agents move to phones where users will never open those files.
