Nat Friedman, who leads product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, said Muse was "heavily inspired" by OpenClaw, an open-source agent project, though Meta built it from scratch, according to TechCrunch and TNW.
Pressed on why Muse shares nearly identical workspace filenames and configuration content with OpenClaw, including its SOUL.md file, Friedman said the team "thought Peter had got those things exactly right," referring to OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, TechCrunch and TNW reported.
Friedman said he started using OpenClaw in January, bought hundreds of Mac minis for his team after members of it fell for the tool, and set out to build something like it that Meta could make safe and scale to billions of users, according to TechCrunch. Steinberger, who built OpenClaw after it launched under earlier names including Clawdbot, was hired by OpenAI in February, TNW reported.
Unlike OpenClaw, which has no gatekeeper for what it connects to, Meta plans to review and approve every connector Muse supports, TNW reported. Borrowing a rival lab's new hire's open-source design down to the filenames, then locking down distribution around it, is Meta running its usual playbook on a trend it did not start.