Ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, whom Meta hired to lead its AI products, bought hundreds of Mac minis for his team after...
Nat Friedman has admitted that Meta 's new Muse personal agent owes a lot to OpenClaw , the open-source agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger . The former GitHub CEO, who now heads AI products at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), said he bought hundreds of Mac minis for his team after trying OpenClaw in January, and that many of them fell in love with it.
Friedman was replying on X to a user who called Muse "OpenClaw for normies." He was clear that Meta did not lift any code. "We built muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by openclaw," he wrote. The goal, he added, was to build something like it that Meta could make safe, secure, easy to use and scalable to billions of people.
Steinberger quote-posted the reply to push back on a "Meta uses OpenClaw" story doing the rounds, saying Meta had built its own agent and crediting Friedman's team. Friedman returned the favour, calling Steinberger a genius whose harness was pioneering from day one.
OpenClaw's always-on agent shaped how Meta designed MuseThe Mac mini detail explains a lot. OpenClaw works best as an agent that never sleeps, with access to your apps and files, and a small desktop left running round the clock became the favoured way to host it.
Muse carries that idea to a mainstream assistant that handles email, restaurant bookings, payments and shopping. Meta's own Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weights model released in August for on-device agents, even lists OpenClaw among the scaffolds it supports.
Alexandr Wang says Meta planned its personal AI sidekick back in 2025Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, meanwhile, wants people to know Muse was not a quick reaction to OpenClaw's popularity. He shared an excerpt from a document he wrote for Meta's board in September 2025, titled "Superintelligent Personal Sidekick."
It describes agents that work out a person's goals and pursue them 24/7, with an interface that is part chatbot, part to-do list. Agents would work through the to-do list in the background, day and night.
Wang later said he co-wrote the document with Friedman. He also teased that Meta has three more ideas "just as big" lined up.
So the blueprint came first. OpenClaw showed the team what it could feel like in practice.
Friedman was replying on X to a user who called Muse "OpenClaw for normies." He was clear that Meta did not lift any code. "We built muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by openclaw," he wrote. The goal, he added, was to build something like it that Meta could make safe, secure, easy to use and scalable to billions of people.
Steinberger quote-posted the reply to push back on a "Meta uses OpenClaw" story doing the rounds, saying Meta had built its own agent and crediting Friedman's team. Friedman returned the favour, calling Steinberger a genius whose harness was pioneering from day one.
OpenClaw's always-on agent shaped how Meta designed MuseThe Mac mini detail explains a lot. OpenClaw works best as an agent that never sleeps, with access to your apps and files, and a small desktop left running round the clock became the favoured way to host it.
Muse carries that idea to a mainstream assistant that handles email, restaurant bookings, payments and shopping. Meta's own Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weights model released in August for on-device agents, even lists OpenClaw among the scaffolds it supports.
Alexandr Wang says Meta planned its personal AI sidekick back in 2025Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, meanwhile, wants people to know Muse was not a quick reaction to OpenClaw's popularity. He shared an excerpt from a document he wrote for Meta's board in September 2025, titled "Superintelligent Personal Sidekick."
It describes agents that work out a person's goals and pursue them 24/7, with an interface that is part chatbot, part to-do list. Agents would work through the to-do list in the background, day and night.
Wang later said he co-wrote the document with Friedman. He also teased that Meta has three more ideas "just as big" lined up.
So the blueprint came first. OpenClaw showed the team what it could feel like in practice.
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