Did Meta's New AI Assistant Copy Someone Else's Code?

Meta just released Muse, a new artificial intelligence assistant designed for everyday people to use on their phones. The app shot to the top of Apple's App Store almost immediately and now has around 600,000 daily users in the US, according to app tracking estimates.

But some users on social media have started asking: where did Muse really come from? Over the past week, people have noticed that Muse appears to share a lot of similarities with an older platform called OpenClaw. Both use the same names for important internal files — the behind-the-scenes code that makes them work. This has sparked conversations online about whether Muse might be built directly on top of OpenClaw's technology.

This discovery comes as AI agents (software programs that can perform tasks independently on your behalf) are having a major moment. Another company called Instinct is raising money at a valuation of $2.5 billion — meaning investors believe the company is worth that much — and is also building an AI agent platform. The question of who built what, and whether anyone copied anyone else's work, matters because it affects everything from company credibility to how fairly the tech industry shares innovations.

Meta hasn't publicly addressed these claims yet. If true, it would raise important questions about whether large tech companies properly credit or license the technology they build upon — especially when smaller innovations from other developers may have come first.