Meta's Muse AI agent attracts 500,000 users within one week amid accusations of copying OpenClaw

Meta's personal AI agent, Muse, has gotten off to a remarkably strong start since its September 8 launch, but the company has simultaneously admitted that the product is "heavily inspired" by the open-source project OpenClaw. According to internal figures reported by The Information, Muse attracted more than 500,000 users within its first week, including over 250,000 daily active users who together submitted more than two million prompts. The launch puts Meta in direct competition with OpenAI and other players racing to define what a consumer-facing personal AI assistant looks like.

What Muse Does and How It's Performing

Muse is currently available in the United States, both as a standalone app and through WhatsApp. It climbed to the number one spot in Apple's App Store, where it has collected more than 31,000 ratings.

The agent is designed to take routine tasks off users' plates: researching and booking travel, hunting for deals, tracking expenses, and resolving scheduling conflicts. That positioning makes it one of the most ambitious consumer agents Meta has shipped, moving beyond chat toward actions that touch personal accounts and data.

Meta Credits OpenClaw, and the Similarities Show

Meta has been unusually candid about Muse's origins. 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 fell in love with OpenClaw and set out to create something similar that could scale to billions of people, calling OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger a "genius."

Users on X, however, noticed more than inspiration. Muse appears to use some of the same file names as OpenClaw, with nearly identical contents. One example is SOUL.md, a text file that defines an AI agent's personality, communication style, and rules of behavior.

Ansh Nanda, co-founder of an AI app, claimed in a widely shared post that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies." When asked why the file names and contents matched so closely, Friedman replied simply, "we thought that Peter [Steinberger] got those things exactly right."

TechCrunch notes that this approach fits Meta's long-standing playbook of identifying promising products and adopting their best features. The most famous example remains Meta's embrace of the Stories format that Snapchat invented, which went on to become a core feature across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

Early Momentum Doesn't Guarantee Lasting Success

Whether Muse's initial surge translates into durable engagement remains an open question. TechCrunch reports that when comparing platforms and market availability directly, Muse even outpaced ChatGPT's early mobile launch — a notable benchmark given ChatGPT's historic adoption curve.

Meta is unlikely to have the space to itself for long. The Information reports that OpenAI has discussed building its own personal AI assistant in response to Muse.

The bigger test ahead may not be features or downloads but trust. For agents like Muse to deliver on their promise, users have to be willing to hand over access to personal data, accounts, and sensitive information — a hurdle that will shape how this category evolves as OpenAI and others respond.