We seem to be entering an AI agent renaissance. Meta’s new consumer-facing AI agent, Muse, topped the App Store charts soon after its release and has 600,000 daily active users in the US, by an Apptopia estimate. And AI agent platform Instinct, whose eponymous creator is fundraising at a $2.5 billion valuation, has been making the rounds in the tech industry. Under the hood, though, there are some obvious similarities to the platform that started it all: OpenClaw.
Muse sure looks a lot like OpenClaw. Meta’s new tool is very cute — and heavily inspired by its open-source predecessor. For the past week or so, some social media users have alleged that Muse is directly built on OpenClaw. The two platforms use the same names for core files (SOUL.md, memory, tools, etc.), and have a lot of similar lines in the doc that govern personality, tone, and more. They also have a similar design. One Redditor argued that “Muse is just a wrapper app built on top of” OpenClaw — alleging it probably also came with that platform’s significant security risks. “Only non-tech ppl are buying the hype.”
Meta has denied the claims. Nat Friedman, head of product for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs wrote on X that Meta built Muse “from scratch.” He did, however, acknowledge Muse is “heavily inspired as a product” by OpenClaw. After he first used OpenClaw in January, he purchased hundreds of Mac Minis for his team at Meta. And with Muse, he aimed to build a similar platform “that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people.” As for why the OpenClaw file names and lines carried over, Friedman said the team believed that Steinberger had gotten those things “exactly right.”
Instinct appears less directly derivative. But like OpenClaw’s then-revolutionary messaging features, it allows users to communicate with their AI agents directly through messaging tools, and people have been using it for the same types of everyday, personal-assistant-esque use cases that made OpenClaw gain traction. One Instinct user raved on X that the AI agent filled out paperwork for an in-network doctor visit, canceled subscriptions, organized a bachelor party, booked activities for a vacation, booked a DMV appointment, paid an outstanding toll bill, and more. Another said their Instinct agent handled the recovery of a lost item they’d left at a hotel in Canada.
Even if both platforms were built from scratch, it’s clear how much they owe to OpenClaw. OpenClaw didn’t invent the concept of AI agents, but in just 10 months, it took them from a proof of concept to something genuinely useful. Cobbled together as a one-man weekend project and running off users’ personal computers, it conversed with users the way they talked to other people: on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Teams, or Discord. In about a week, it garnered two million visitors and 100,000 stars on GitHub, spurring people to buy Mac Minis to run their agents 24/7, inspiring someone to create a social media network for the AI agents to “chat” on, and sparking a series of in-person meetups around the world for OpenClaw users.
