I had coffee this weekend with my good friend Michael Galpert, father to my godchildren. Too much coffee. We talked too much Claw. OpenClaw that is.

Michael has been running around the country organizing ClawCons. New York, Austin, Tokyo next. Not industry conferences. In the halcyon days of Web 2.0, we called them meetups and un-conferences. Sponsors are falling over themselves to get them attached to this new new thing, that borders on madness and hope.

Just people showing up in rooms because they want to talk about what OpenClaw makes possible. Developers, yes. But also small business owners, retirees, students, people who have never attended a tech event in their lives. The energy in those rooms, Michael says, is unlike anything he has seen in years.

I have known Michael long enough to know when he is genuinely excited about something versus just being hyperactive for a second. He is so ‘clawed’ into OpenClaw.

Makes you wonder: what is really going on here? Hope and madness. Whatever the reasons, I am fascinated with the very idea of OpenClaw, how it might be foretelling a future we are not seeing yet.

OpenClaw is a free, open-source AI agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. It started as a weekend project in November 2025, originally called Clawdbot, went through a rename to Moltbot after a trademark complaint from Anthropic, and landed as OpenClaw at the end of January 2026.

You connect it to whatever AI model you prefer. It runs on your own machine. You talk to it through the messaging apps you already use, including Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, and Discord. And then it does things. Typical chatbots answer questions. It acts. It clears your inbox, makes reservations, tracks your calendar, executes tasks on your behalf while you are doing something else.

By March 2026, it had crossed 247,000 stars on GitHub. Steinberger has since been hired by OpenAI to work on personal agents, and the project has moved to a foundation. The lobster, as they say, has molted. Ironic, the movement’s Jesus has ceded control to his apostles.

Across the planet, everyone is tinkering.

China tech is going bonkers over OpenClaw. On a Friday afternoon in Shenzhen, nearly a thousand people lined up outside Tencent headquarters to get OpenClaw installed on their laptops. Engineers from Tencent’s cloud unit were helping students, retirees, and office workers set it up. The Chinese have their own phrase for it now: raise a lobster, a reference to OpenClaw’s red lobster logo.

Every major Chinese cloud provider has released its own version. Tencent has WorkBuddy. MiniMax has MaxClaw. Moonshot has Kimi Claw. Local governments in Shenzhen and Wuxi announced grants for startups building on the platform. MiniMax, whose model runs inside many OpenClaw setups, has seen its stock rise over 600 percent since its IPO two months ago.

And then Beijing sent a diktat to state banks, government agencies, and the families of military personnel: Clip the Claw.

A thousand people lining up on Friday. A memo from the CCP. Same technology. Same week.

It’s not nothing.

The Mac Mini has become the unofficial hardware of the OpenClaw moment. People are buying the Apple desktop with a single purpose: a dedicated machine to run their agent, separate from their main computer, connected to a free or cheap open-source model. The SF Standard called the Mac Mini bro the new matcha latte guy. Oy vey!

The publication shares the story of Aaron Ng, a 35-year-old AI engineer in the Sunset. He did not want to give OpenClaw access to his own computer. So he bought a Mac Mini just for the agent. It handles his email, tracks updates about his newborn, controls his smart lights. He texts it baby logs because, in his words, the existing apps were terrible. Others are using it to post their bets on Polymarket to Twitter and game the results.

Mac Mini bro! Apple has backed into a cultural moment, without even trying. Jokes aside, this physical object represents a philosophy. The intelligence lives on your machine. You own it. You aim it. No subscription. No permission required.

I checked in with Hiten Shah, one of my close friends who is building hard with OpenClaw. He summed it up in a single line: (AI) Power to the people.

This is why retirees are lining up in Shenzhen. This is why people with no GitHub account are showing up at ClawCons. For the first time, they can feel AI’s intelligence, even if it is not very good. Yet. Not a demo. Not a keynote promise. Not big boys burning billion dollars a month. A thing that actually does things on their behalf. The gap between what you want done and what gets done has always required either your own time or someone else’s labor. OpenClaw makes that gap feel smaller. That feeling, even in its rough and half-broken form, is new.

It has been almost a month since I published How AI Goes To Work. “What OpenClaw shows is how AI will work in the background,” is what I wrote. “And that is what the ‘AI’ future looks like for normal people. Not a separate AI app. Intelligence woven into tools you already use. Doing work you used to do yourself. Or used to hire someone to do, done by software.”

I have seen this kind of excitement before. Many times. That is what keeps me around in Silicon Valley. The excitement of new technology is my addiction. I saw this with the big poppa, the internet itself. Web 2.0. Social. Cloud. In terms of product, the closest parallel to OpenClaw for me is my first time with WordPress.

WordPress did not invent PHP or MySQL or web publishing. It was a continuation of someone else’s idea. However, it assembled those pieces into something a non-technical person like me could actually use. The gap between having something to say and being able to publish it closed overnight. No developer. No hosting deal. No media company gatekeeping who got a voice. Yes, there were other platforms and other options, but it dovetailed with the rise of open source, the optimism of publishing on the internet, and the joy of sharing and being social.

The best part that most people forget about WordPress is that it was never really about us. It was about the rest of the world that could not afford American software economics. At Forbes.com, we spent millions on bad software, trying to publish professionally. Now you could do it for free. A teacher in Jakarta. A student in Manila. A journalist in Nairobi. Suddenly they had the same publishing infrastructure as the New York Times. That is what the excitement was really about. Not the product. It was the collapse of the permission structure.

OpenClaw has that same siren call. Two hundred dollars a month, or even twenty a month, to Anthropic or OpenAI is not a rounding error for most of the world. The world doesn’t pay $10 for lattes. This is the real barrier. But Chinese-made Qwen runs locally. Chinese-made DeepSeek runs locally. OpenClaw does not care which model you plug in. So someone in Manila or Cairo or Bogota can run the same agentic setup as a San Francisco startup, on a model that costs them nothing. If you want something from Claude or ChatGPT, and you can afford to pay for it, then plug that in too.

WordPress democratized voice. OpenClaw is pointing at something further: action. The gap between what you intend and what actually gets done has always required resources. A team. A budget. An organization. OpenClaw is the first very rough sketch of closing that gap for everyone.

WordPress operated in a forgiving domain. A bad plugin broke your homepage. Mine broke all the time. And there were no plugins. OpenClaw operates in the domain of real-world action. A bad agent deletes your inbox, spams your contacts, creates a dating profile without your knowledge. The blast radius is different. One of OpenClaw’s own maintainers warned publicly that if you cannot understand how to run a command line, this is far too dangerous for you to use safely. That is not a ringing endorsement. But it is also not the point.

OpenClaw is not ready for prime time. The security issues are real and the warts are visible. It is a symbol of what is coming, not the thing itself.

AI can be personal. Not a service you subscribe to. Not a platform you visit. A thing that runs on your machine, serves your intentions, uses the model you choose, and works through the apps you already live in.

In his keynote speech at GTC, Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang described OpenClaw as:

What is Open Claw? It’s an agentic system. It calls and connects to large language models.It has resources that it manages. It could access tools, it could access file systems, it could access large language models. It’s able to do scheduling. it’s able to– do cron jobs, is able to decompose a problem that you gave it into step by step by step. It could spawn off and call upon other subagents. It has IO. You could talk to it in any modality you want. It’s an operating system. I’ve just used the same syntax that I would describe an operating system. Open Claw has open sourced essentially the operating system of agentic computers.

In 2023, Bill Gates wrote that “in the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence” and that agents would “utterly change how we live.” OpenClaw, running on a free Chinese model through WhatsApp on a $599 Mac Mini in the Sunset, is the first time regular people can actually feel that becoming real.

That’s what I am Clawing about.

March 16, 2025. San Francisco

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that leadership wants OpenAI, the company, to focus. Seems like a plain old business strategy story. Nope!

First, in more prosaic terms, the all-hands and what was said was indicative of need for focus and urgency. I read it as mild panic stations. Second, step back enough and a clear and complete image should emerge. It reveals the real game being played. It is the grand hand at the big AI poker table. The IPO. Who gets there first, who sets the rules. And who really wins.

The IPO is not about one company. Instead it is about three American AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which owns xAI. It is about the scale of money to be raised from the market. It is also the urgency to do so. The Economist notes that if all three offer 15 percent of their shares, the combined sum would roughly equal every dollar raised across all American IPOs over the past decade.

It is against the backdrop of a global crisis, and this being a battle for winner take all. And most importantly, with the Middle East busy with bigger problems, the money spigot for American AI might be as tight as the Strait of Hormuz right now. The Gulf sovereign wealth funds that have been backstopping this AI frenzy have other fish to fry, at present.

Public market investors in New York and London will now have to carry the weight. Which means the IPO window is real, it is short, it is now, and it will not stay open forever. In short, this is a three horse race to the IPO market. And OpenAI isn’t the leading pony.

OpenAI was all over the map. Sora. A web browser called Atlas. A hardware device. TikTok-for-AI. All announced with the same breathless urgency, same press release energy, different product each time. Cashing in on the announcement economy.

Simo told staff last week they had to stop being distracted by “side quests.” That is a remarkable word for what was, in practice, an $840 billion company running several unrelated experiments inside itself while its most focused rival ate its lunch.

All startups, big and small, are messy. Some have more disorder than others. The admission of chaos is a way to show recognition, and eventual correction of the problems. The question to me, is why this admission of chaos? And that’s why you need to bring out the popcorn.

Let’s break down the WSJ news report itself. The fact that the Journal “reviewed” the transcript is a giveaway. The Journal didn’t say they had the transcript, or that it was leaked to them. “Reviewed by” is a tell. This is a controlled leak. Nothing wrong with it.

Companies do it often. Big publications like the Wall Street Journal get the scoops and exclusives. This is a game that has been played for the longest time. Every word attributed to Simo, from “side quests,” to “code red,” to the Anthropic “wake-up call,” was chosen for outside consumption, to shape the story.

Don’t get me wrong. While the actual new content of the story is thin, it is still real. The organizational dysfunction is real. The Sora team was housed under research while launching a consumer product — a good sign of that dysfunction. However, the Anthropic “wake-up call” framing is a classic Jedi mind trick. Admit competitive weakness to look clear-eyed to investors and customers, while simultaneously using a rival’s success as the proverbial carrot and the stick.

However, one has to read the story in a larger context. The WSJ report has to be read against other news this week. Reuters reports OpenAI is in advanced talks with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield to create a new joint venture valued at around $10 billion that would push its enterprise products through PE-backed portfolio companies across industries. It is forming “Frontier Alliances” with McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini, announced last month. This is a great narrative being put together for a company on a deadline, for a specific audience. OpenAI is great at building narratives. It might back its way into a long-term strategy, but for now, you have to see every piece of news coming out of OpenAI right now as part of a jigsaw puzzle.

There is one audience for this final picture. The bankers and institutional investors who will price the offering. OpenAI needs them to believe three simple things. It has its house in order. It has a real swing at corporate dollars. And that it is ahead in the AI race, both for consumers and corporations.

One thing odd, maybe just to me, is why OpenAI has been stuffing its ranks with former Facebookers who are known to juice growth, find edges, and keep people addicted. They have little background in getting enterprises to buy into a product. Simo herself ran the Facebook app. That organization’s genius is consumer engagement: behavioral hooks, dopamine loops, the relentless optimization of the feed. You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style.

The next shoe to drop would be news that OpenAI poached some big name executives from say, Salesforce or one of the big boy SaaS companies to take charge of the enterprise push. Right now, OpenAI’s own numbers show that its enterprise business generates $10 billion out of a total annualized revenue of $25 billion. In comparison, Anthropic, the smaller company, is widely regarded as ahead in enterprise adoption.

Why is all this important? Again, as I said, money. I know I am repeating myself. The public market money. That is the only real story. There are three AI companies heading toward public markets. Two have friends in Washington. One has a great satellite launch and Internet business. One has focus. One is perceived as an “all over the map” business.

Zoomed in, there is a reason why Grok and OpenAI are looking to go after the “code” business. Anthropic’s success is good enough proof that AI, despite all the talk of impending singularity and AGI, is all about software — the critical choke point in a digital-first world. That is the business. For now! Not orbital data centers. Not a social video app. Not a hardware device. All these may (or may not) be real money spinners in the future, but for now, you gotta focus on juicing your revenues to go public. Focus is the answer.

Anthropic’s revenue run rate has surged past $19 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 and roughly $14 billion just weeks before that. Amodei confirmed at Morgan Stanley that $6 billion was added in February alone, driven almost entirely by Claude Code. Revenue doubling in two months. That is the curve that makes a prospectus compelling without a PR campaign to explain it.

The US government has tried to change that calculus. Defense Secretary Hegseth declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk after it refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its models. Altman positioned OpenAI as a bridge-builder while quietly moving to take Anthropic’s vacated government contracts.

Anthropic has no friends in Washington. What it has, in the immortal words of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, is “Developers, Developers, Developers.” Right now, developers are the ones who actually matter. Despite its somewhat unclear messaging and occasionally awkward public identity, Anthropic’s Claude Code is a product they want to use. Wallet always speaks the loudest.

I won’t be crying over OpenAI. They are doing $25 billion in annualized revenue, with 900 million weekly users, and a CEO who has proven he can bend a narrative to his will.

As I said before. When a grand hand is being played, focus is not such a bad thing. Especially when the billions you desperately need are on the line.

March 17, 2026. San Francisco.