Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Meta's product chief credits OpenClaw after users diffed Muse's SOUL.md
The copyable layer of a consumer agent turns out to be its scaffolding. Meta's head of product said as much in public after users compared Muse's config files with OpenClaw's. The open source licence makes that a product argument.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Early adopters had spent days comparing the two agents' internal files, and one user checked contents instead of names and found them almost entirely the same.
- Asked why the workspace file names were identical if Muse was built from scratch, Friedman did not dispute the premise and said the team thought Peter had got those things exactly right.
- The two answers went up minutes apart as replies rather than as a company statement, and Meta published nothing of its own.
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Why it matters
- capability Reading an agent's personality config is now something ordinary early adopters do, so a claim of original construction gets tested against a directory listing before anyone reads the launch post.
- constraint Meta's own account puts its advantage in review and reach, so a team choosing Muse over the open source original is choosing who approves the connectors it will be allowed to use.
- exposure The consent that carries the risk is granted by an individual on their own Mac, so whoever owns IT can inherit microphone, camera, file and location access they never signed off.
- precedent A head of product conceding the resemblance invites the same file-by-file comparison of the next consumer agent, and shifts the burden onto anyone who says theirs was built from scratch.
A harness sits around a model and holds the instruction files, the tool definitions and the loop that decides what the agent does next [13]. SOUL.md is one of those files: plain text, setting an agent's personality, tone, values, boundaries and areas of expertise [6]. Anyone who opens the workspace folder can read it.
Ansh Nanda, who cofounded an AI app company, wrote that Muse is OpenClaw for normies [4]. He also put the question to Muse itself and posted the reply, in which the agent said the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw's was a match and not a coincidence [5]. Another user skipped the file names and compared the contents, and found those almost entirely the same [7].
Friedman's answer set out a history. 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 [8]. He called Steinberger a genius and his harness pioneering from the start, and said the goal with Muse was to build something like OpenClaw that Meta could make safe, secure, easy to use, and able to scale to billions of people [9]. "We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," he wrote [1].
Nanda then asked the narrower question: if it was built from scratch, why the exact workspace file names, and why near identical content in SOUL.md [10]. Friedman did not dispute the premise. He answered that the team thought Peter had got those things exactly right [11].
The pitch is safety, security and scale for billions of people [9]. Meta holds the gate. It has told developers it will review and approve the connectors that plug outside services into Muse, and it decides which ones get featured, while nobody owns OpenClaw's distribution, so nothing there plays gatekeeper [16]. Steinberger, an Austrian developer, released OpenClaw as open source and it became a hit among developers in January [14]. Muse runs on macOS only so far, and it also works inside WhatsApp [20]. Last Thursday Google Home opened to third party agents, OpenClaw among them [23].
The company has done this before, more slowly. Snapchat launched Stories in 2013 and Instagram shipped its own version in August 2016, about three years later [18][22]. Zuckerberg acknowledged at a US antitrust hearing in 2020 that Meta had copied its competitors [19]. Friedman ran GitHub as chief executive before joining Meta last year [17].
For a team deciding on Monday whether Muse goes on a work Mac, the components separate cleanly. The access request comes first: authentication to email, calendar, messaging and social accounts, plus macOS permissions covering files, the microphone, the camera and location, granted by a user who has to be 18 or over [21]. The approval path comes second, and for Muse it runs through Meta's connector review [16].
The same split applies to whatever you ship. On one axis, whether a competitor who reads your config files could rebuild them in a weekend. On the other, whether you control the surface where users find you and the queue that approves what connects to it. Meta's answer for Muse is WhatsApp and the connector review, with the app free within limits and more capacity sold at $20 and $100 [21].
What to watch
- Whether Meta issues documentation or a company statement naming OpenClaw, instead of replies from Friedman's own account.
- Whether Meta's connector review rejects or slows third party services that OpenClaw users wire up without asking anyone.
- Whether Steinberger, who joined OpenAI in February according to thenextweb, responds publicly to Friedman's account.