Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence

Early adopters of Meta’s Muse have been speculating that the reason the AI works so well is because it’s OpenClaw under the hood, wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package. Meta now says those comparisons aren’t entirely off-base. According to an X post by Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw.”

However, he clarified that Muse itself was “built from scratch.”

Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said that the team at Meta had fallen in love with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be “something like OpenClaw” that could be scaled to billions of people.

Because OpenClaw is an open source project, it wouldn’t be surprising that Meta looked to it for inspiration, especially given its breakout success, which prompted OpenAI to snatch up its creator earlier this year. However, it speaks to Meta’s well-known playbook that involves taking promising products, then copying their best features — something it did most notoriously with Snapchat’s invention of the stories format.

Friedman’s statement on X was made in response to a post that had gone viral among the AI crowd, where Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, claimed that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.”