OpenClaw will establish an independent foundation: NVIDIA and ByteDance have already joined, Tencent is in talks.

On March 27, news came that OpenClaw will transition into an upcoming independent foundation to continue its open-source operations. Founder and Austrian developer Peter Steinberger revealed in his first interview with Bloomberg after joining OpenAI that NVIDIA and ByteDance have confirmed their participation in the foundation, with Tencent in discussions and having also communicated with Microsoft. He stated that he is “trying to be Switzerland” in this matter.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously called Steinberger a “genius” and stated, “The future will be extremely multi-Agent, and supporting open source is very important for us.” Steinberger has joined the Codex team at OpenAI and disclosed the integration direction of Codex and OpenClaw: when an Agent is smart enough, it will autonomously write code to enhance its own capabilities, “the boundary between ‘programming’ and ‘non-programming’ is disappearing, and this is also the reason we ultimately decided at OpenAI to merge the two.” He envisions a future with multiple Agents where everyone has both work Agents and personal Agents that can call upon each other while maintaining their own data boundaries.
In the interview, he also discussed the differences between China and the U.S. in the application of AI Agents: “In the U.S., some companies will fire you for using OpenClaw; in China, some companies will fire you for not using it.” He mentioned that Chinese companies have shown him a chart listing each employee’s name, with a column next to it stating “What has been automated today?” actively encouraging employees to use AI to increase efficiency by tenfold. In contrast, some companies in the U.S. have restricted employee use due to security concerns. Steinberger believes that neither approach is perfect, but the U.S. can learn something from China’s quicker adoption of new technologies, stating, “This stuff is too new; the only way to learn it is to actually use it and see.” During GTC, he communicated with Chinese companies like MiniMax, Dark Side of the Moon, and Tencent. (Bloomberg)