Ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, whom Meta hired to lead its AI products: The wider industry impact

Meta’s Muse was built after Nat Friedman bought hundreds of Mac minis

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.

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. “We built muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by openclaw,” he wrote. 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. He shared an excerpt from a document he wrote for Meta’s board in September 2025, titled “Superintelligent Personal Sidekick.”

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. Friedman was replying on X to a user who called Muse “OpenClaw for normies. He was clear that Meta did not lift any code. 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. Friedman returned the favour, calling Steinberger a genius whose harness was pioneering from day one. Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, meanwhile, wants people to know Muse was not a quick reaction to OpenClaw’s popularity.