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People queue to have their laptops install with OpenClaw, an open-source AI assistant at the Baidu headquarter in Beijing on March 11, 2026. Adek Berry | Afp | Getty Images
Three months ago, the tech industry was unaware of a lobster-themed AI coding project built by an under-the-radar Austrian software developer. OpenClaw, as that creation is known, has enjoyed such a rapid ascent since then that it took center stage this week at GTC, Nvidia's annual conference, where the leader of the world's most valuable company called it "the most popular, open-source project in the history of humanity." "This is definitely the next ChatGPT," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC's Jim Cramer on the sidelines of the developer event in Santa Clara, California. In his keynote, Huang described OpenClaw as the go-to option for building AI agents that can perform tasks like scouting eBay for deals and then placing bids, and said it "exceeded what Linux did in 30 years" in mere weeks. The phenomenon is so pivotal to Nvidia that the chipmaker said at GTC that it's building free accompanying security services — packaged as NemoClaw — intended to help spur more adoption of OpenClaw and get large businesses comfortable with its use. Huang was validating what the rest of the market has been witnessing. An independent developer, rather than a giant, richly valued lab like OpenAI or Anthropic, came up with the next big thing in AI and, in doing so, exposed a potential major flaw in the investment thesis behind the large language models: They may be getting commoditized.
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While OpenAI and Anthropic remain deeply popular and continue building services that are resonating with users, the power of OpenClaw is that it's enabling all sorts of developers and hobbyists to quickly create and manage AI agents across online communications channels like WhatsApp and Telegram from their home computers. Some industry experts say OpenClaw's breakout shows that the value in AI isn't all accruing to the two leading startups, which have a combined private market value of over $1 trillion, and their hyperscaler peers. "It solidified the open-source community and proved that fully autonomous AI can be run at home without relying on the Magnificent 7 or Big AI," said David Hendrickson, CEO of consulting firm GenerAIte Solutions. "I suspect this was the black swan moment most big AI companies feared." Hendrickson said developers have been gravitating to the Chinese AI models because they are good enough and cheaper to run than the powerful proprietary models from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google . And because developers use OpenClaw on their personal computers like Apple Mac Minis to manage their fleets of always-operating AI agents, they've discovered it's far more economical than tapping the cloud to access the bigger models. "As foundation models rapidly commoditize, attention is moving toward agent frameworks that emphasize autonomy, usability, locality, and control to power agentic AI applications and drive business values," said Charlie Dai, an analyst at Forrester. OpenAI and Anthropic are well aware of the threat. Anthropic has been debuting similar OpenClaw-like features, such as a new channels tool. And last month, in a Sunday post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that Peter Steinberger, the developer of OpenClaw, was joining the AI company and that the service he created would "live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support." Altman called Steinberger a "genius with a lot of amazing ideas," and said he would help "drive the next generation of personal agents."
'I can't rely on this'
But the open-source nature of OpenClaw means that OpenAI doesn't own the technology. That laissez-faire dynamic can be a challenge for enterprise adoption, as many large companies are wary about the security risks that could arise from allowing hundreds or thousands of digital assistants to access sensitive internal data or take actions that could compromise their businesses. With NemoClaw, Nvidia is trying to provide that security layer. "You can maybe deal with the risks for personal use, but when it comes to building a business, I can't rely on this, and I don't feel safe with it," Israeli developer Gavriel Cohen told CNBC. "It's not responsible to connect my customer data to it." Cohen said it felt like "a huge light bulb" turned on in his head when he began to brainstorm how to use OpenClaw within his AI marketing agency. With the service being able to run on messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord and Signal, Cohen imagined having AI agents helping to facilitate conversations with his colleagues involving client management, product development, finance and other business functions. But he noticed some major issues from the start, such as the software failing to distinguish one WhatsApp group message from another. Cohen said the last thing he wanted was for a co-worker to ask an AI agent whether he has time for an afternoon meeting, and for the agent to reply that Cohen has to take his daughter to ballet at that time because it's extrapolating his whereabouts from his personal messages. With the assistance of Anthropic's Claude Code, Cohen spent days creating his own homegrown OpenClaw variant tailored to meet his expectations of security, like walling off his personal WhatsApp group from his work chats. Since releasing his creation, dubbed NanoClaw, to the open-source community at the end of January, the project snowballed within the AI developer community. Cohen said his wife started chatting with her new NanoClaw-spawned AI agent named Andy and discovered that the software could help her track the price of baby strollers, pinging her on WhatsApp when it spotted a good deal. "That would be like a SaaS product that you would maybe spend $10 a month on a subscription for," Cohen said. Cohen and his brother have since shuttered their AI marketing firm, created a new startup called NanoCo that will offer paid services to accompany NanoClaw, and partnered last week with container technology company Docker to solidify itself as an OpenClaw competitor.
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David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said the tech industry is "witnessing a classic platform shift," with foundation models and Chinese labs "converging in capability." "The models become the engine; the agent framework becomes the car," Bader said. Representatives from OpenAI and Anthropic didn't provide a comment for this story. Not everyone in the tech industry is convinced that foundation models are losing steam. Venture capitalist Jerry Chen of Greylock, an Anthropic investor, said OpenClaw's success in showing what a world of "intelligent agents" can look like doesn't take away from the importance of the underlying foundation models, which he still sees as more powerful than the so-called open-weight alternatives. "The buzz around OpenClaw stems from making AI more tangible to a broader audience beyond researchers and technologists," Chen said. "The interesting question now is whether OpenClaw becomes the de facto standard — the Linux of the market, as Jensen puts it — or just the first of many open and closed-source agentic operating systems." For a Wall Street analyst covering Nvidia, the OpenClaw moment is historic in its gravity. Jay Goldberg of Seaport Research Partners is the lone Nvidia analyst among roughly 70 tracked by FactSet with a sell recommendation on the stock. He initiated his coverage in April after the stock had already rocketed from the AI boom, but the shares kept rallying and are up more than 60% since his sell rating. "Part of my critique of Nvidia has always been like, what's the point of all this AI? There's no consumer use cases for any of it," Goldberg said. "I've always couched my rating by saying, look, where I could be wrong is if somebody comes up with a really incredible AI application." After playing around with OpenClaw on a recently purchased Mac Mini, Goldberg said he can finally understand the excitement. As a parent of three kids, Goldberg said he gets an average of 10 emails a week that he dreads reading, and would love for an agent to scan the messages and tell him of the important stuff like if he has to pick up his kids early from school or get them dressed up for picture day. "It's not just the functionality of the thing itself, but it's the pieces of our lives that we give it access to," Goldberg said. Goldberg isn't ready to boost his rating on Nvidia, but he admitted that he's "envious" of Huang, who he says "nailed it" in describing OpenClaw as an operating system. Meanwhile, Goldberg said he's watching tons of TikTok videos on OpenClaw and wants to understand it better before he can feel safe enough to really bake it into his life. "it's janky, it is incredibly insecure and it's like my Mac Mini is kind of half working," Goldberg said about OpenClaw's growing pains. "It's very easy to see how this can become really powerful and really useful." WATCH: Nvidia's one of the fastest growing companies with one of the lowest valuations.
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