Meta Says Muse Looks Like OpenClaw Because It Was Built That Way
Users spent a fortnight comparing Meta's new Muse agent with OpenClaw and found its configuration files nearly identical. Nat Friedman, product head at Meta Superintelligence Labs, says that is no accident. He calls Muse heavily inspired by the open source project, and built from scratch.
September 22, 2026 - 10:36 pm
Credit: gguy via Shutterstock
"We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw." — Nat Friedman posted on X on Monday evening. The head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs was answering a fortnight of speculation about Meta’s new personal agent, and why it felt so familiar to anyone who had used the open source one.
Sarah Perez Reported the Exchange for TechCrunch
Early adopters had spent days comparing Muse’s internal files with OpenClaw’s, and they kept finding more than a family resemblance.
What Users Found
The thread that set it off came from Ansh Nanda, who cofounded an AI app company. He wrote that Muse is OpenClaw for normies, and that it is actually just OpenClaw. Nanda had put the question to Muse itself and posted the reply. The agent said the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw’s was not a coincidence but a match. Others piled in. One noted that Muse carries a SOUL.md file, the plain text configuration file that sets an agent’s personality, tone, values, boundaries and areas of expertise. Another checked the contents rather than the names, and found those almost entirely the same too.
Friedman’s Answer
Friedman set out the history in his first reply. He used OpenClaw in January, then bought hundreds of Mac minis for the Superintelligence Labs team, and a lot of them fell in love with it. He called Steinberger a genius and his harness pioneering from the start. The goal with Muse, he wrote, was to build something like OpenClaw that Meta could make safe, secure, easy to use, and able to scale to billions of people.
Nanda came back with a narrower question. If Muse was built from scratch, why copy the exact file names for the workspace, and why near identical content in SOUL.md. Was that intentional, or an artefact of inspiration? Friedman did not dispute the premise. He answered that the team thought Peter had got those things exactly right.
Who Steinberger Is
Steinberger, an Austrian developer, wrote OpenClaw and released it as open source. It became a hit among developers in January and spread well past them. The project went through two names before that one, launching as Clawdbot and then Moltbot. The harness Friedman praised is the scaffolding around a model rather than the model itself. It holds the instruction files, the tool definitions and the loop that decides what the agent does next. SOUL.md is one of those files.
We reported in February that he joined OpenAI. In May we covered the token bill his own project ran up. His framework keeps turning up inside other companies’ products. Last Thursday we wrote about Google Home opening to third party agents, OpenClaw among them.
The license allows it. Steinberger published OpenClaw under an open source license, which makes the file similarities a product question rather than a legal one. Open source exists so that other people can read the code and build on it.