Meta's Muse heavily inspired by OpenClaw, Friedman admits

OpenClaw's breakout success drew attention from OpenAI, which snapped up its creator earlier this year, and Meta's product head says he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the Superintelligence Labs team after using OpenClaw in January. That enthusiasm is the backdrop to the current admission: Friedman says the team wanted Muse to be "something like OpenClaw" that Meta could make safe and secure and scale to billions of people.

The episode fits Meta's well-known pattern of taking promising products and copying their best features, as it did most notoriously with Snapchat's stories format. What makes it unusual is the open-source angle. Because OpenClaw is open source, drawing on it is less clear-cut than lifting a rival's proprietary feature, and Friedman's public praise for Peter Steinberger's "pioneering" harness suggests Meta is framing the debt as homage rather than theft.

So far the resemblance has not hurt adoption, with Muse recently hitting No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. The question is likely whether that momentum holds once more of Muse's code is compared openly against OpenClaw's, and whether Steinberger weighs in. Meta says it has nothing more to add beyond Friedman's statement.