Meta says Muse drew heavily on open‑source project OpenClaw
Nat Friedman said Meta built the assistant from scratch but took the product idea from Peter Steinberger's OpenClaw, after users found matching workspace filenames.
Meta built its Muse assistant from scratch but took the product idea from OpenClaw, Nat Friedman said on X in remarks TechCrunch reported on Tuesday. Friedman is head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs. "We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," he wrote.
The comment followed users comparing the two assistants. TechCrunch reported that Muse and OpenClaw share workspace filenames, and that the contents of their SOUL.md files are close to identical. That file sets an agent's personality and behavioural boundaries.
OpenClaw is an open-source project by Peter Steinberger that spread fast this year. OpenAI hired Steinberger in February 2026, according to TechCrunch. Friedman used OpenClaw in January and then bought Mac minis for the Meta Superintelligence Labs team, TechCrunch said.
The two claims sit apart. Whether Muse's code was written from scratch is Meta's own account, and no outside party has checked it. The matching filenames and the SOUL.md overlap are what users and TechCrunch say they found in the shipped app.