Meta's AI Agent Muse Hits 500,000 Users in First Week, Admits Copying OpenClaw

Meta's new personal AI agent Muse drew more than 500,000 users in its first week after launching September 8, according to internal data cited by The Information. Of those, more than 250,000 were daily active users, and together they submitted over two million prompts.

Muse is available in the US as a standalone app and through WhatsApp. It reached the number one spot on Apple's App Store, collecting more than 31,000 ratings. The agent is designed to handle routine tasks such as researching and booking trips, finding deals, tracking expenses, and resolving scheduling conflicts.

Meta acknowledges the OpenClaw connection

Meta has openly stated that Muse draws heavily from OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent project. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former GitHub CEO, wrote on X that Muse is "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw" but was "built from scratch." Friedman said his team admired OpenClaw and wanted to build something similar that could scale to billions of users, calling OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger a "genius."

The similarities go beyond concept. Users on X identified matching file names between Muse and OpenClaw, including a file called SOUL.md — a text file that defines an AI agent's personality, communication style, and behavioral rules — with nearly identical contents in both products. Ansh Nanda, co-founder of an AI app, wrote in a widely shared post that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies."

When asked directly why the file names and contents were nearly identical, Friedman responded, "we thought that Peter [Steinberger] got those things exactly right."

TechCrunch characterized the move as consistent with Meta's history of identifying successful product features elsewhere and replicating them, pointing to Meta's adoption of Snapchat's Stories format as the best-known precedent.

Early traction doesn't guarantee longevity

According to TechCrunch, Muse's early adoption numbers exceed ChatGPT's initial mobile launch when adjusted for platform reach and market availability. The Information also reports that OpenAI has discussed building its own personal AI assistant in response to Muse's launch.

Whether Muse's early momentum translates into sustained usage remains uncertain. The core challenge for any agent-style product is whether users trust it with access to personal accounts, payment details, and sensitive scheduling data — the kind of access Muse needs to fully automate tasks like trip booking and expense tracking.

What this means

Muse's launch numbers are strong by any measure, but the OpenClaw admission raises questions about how Meta's AI labs are sourcing product ideas from the open-source ecosystem. Crediting inspiration is different from crediting code, and the near-identical file structures suggest Meta's team worked directly from OpenClaw's implementation rather than building an independent interpretation of the concept. For Steinberger and the open-source AI agent community, the episode illustrates a familiar tension: a well-funded lab can take a promising open-source idea, rebuild it with more resources, and distribute it to hundreds of millions of users almost overnight. The bigger unresolved question is adoption durability — Muse's first-week numbers say little about whether users will hand over the account access and personal data these agents need to be genuinely useful.