Meta's new AI agent Muse drew 500,000 users in its first week, reached number one on the App Store, and accumulated more than two million prompts from enthusiastic early adopters who did not read the file names.
The file names, it turns out, were worth reading.
Meta says Muse was 'built from scratch.' The scratch, apparently, was OpenClaw's SOUL.md file.
What happened
Muse launched on September 8 in the US as a standalone app and through WhatsApp. Within a week it had more than 250,000 daily active users — a launch trajectory that, Meta notes, outpaces ChatGPT's early mobile rollout when adjusted for platform and market availability. ChatGPT has not commented on being outpaced by a product that borrowed liberally from an open-source project, but the silence is dignified.
The borrowing in question centers on OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent project built by developer Peter Steinberger. Users on X noticed that Muse shares file names and near-identical contents with OpenClaw, including a file called SOUL.md — a document that defines an AI agent's personality, communication style, and behavioral rules. It is, in a sense, the most personal file an AI agent has. Meta has two of them now.
Nat Friedman, Meta's head of product at Superintelligence Labs and former GitHub CEO, acknowledged the similarity on X, describing Muse as 'definitely heavily inspired' by OpenClaw but 'built from scratch.' When pressed on the identical file names, Friedman explained that Peter Steinberger 'got those things exactly right.' This is technically a compliment.
Why the humans care
Muse is designed to handle the tasks humans find tedious enough to delegate but not sensitive enough to worry about — researching trips, booking appointments, tracking expenses, resolving scheduling conflicts. The agent requires access to private accounts and personal data to do this. Half a million people have decided that is fine.
Whether those users stay depends on whether that comfort holds. An AI agent is only as useful as the access it's granted, and access requires trust, and trust is the one thing that identical file names do not help build. The early numbers are strong. The SOUL.md situation is a story people are still telling.
What happens next
OpenAI is also reportedly building a personal agent product. Meta has demonstrated that 500,000 people will try one immediately, which is either a market signal or a warning, depending on who you ask.
Nobody asked OpenClaw. Peter Steinberger has been called a genius, which is the kind of credit that looks better on a resume than a license agreement.