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Meta Says Muse Was 'Heavily Inspired' by OpenClaw, Though Built From Scratch
Meta has acknowledged that its Muse AI assistant was "heavily inspired" by the open source project OpenClaw, while insisting the product itself was built from scratch. The admission followed viral speculation among early users that Muse is essentially OpenClaw repackaged for a mainstream audience.
Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, said in a post on X that Muse was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," while clarifying that the assistant itself was built from scratch.
The statement came in response to a viral post from Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, who claimed that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies." Early adopters of Muse had been speculating that the tool performs well because it is OpenClaw under the hood, wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package.
Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said his team had fallen in love with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be "something like OpenClaw" that could be scaled to billions of people. Meta also acknowledged similarities extending to some of Muse's workspace filenames and content.
OpenClaw is an open source project whose breakout success prompted OpenAI to bring on its creator earlier this year, making it a plausible reference point for Meta's team.
The episode echoes a familiar Meta playbook of taking promising products and adopting their best features, a pattern the company followed most notoriously with Snapchat's stories format.