OpenClaw to Establish Independent Foundation: NVIDIA, ByteDance Already On Board, Tencent in Talks

According to 1M AI News monitoring, OpenClaw will transition to a soon-to-be-established independent foundation to continue its open-source operation. Founder and Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, in his first interview with Bloomberg after joining OpenAI, revealed that both NVIDIA and ByteDance have confirmed their participation in the foundation, Tencent is in talks to join, and there have been communications with Microsoft. He described himself as trying to be a "Switzerland" in this matter.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously referred to Steinberger as a "genius" and stated that "the future will involve a large number of agents, and open source is very important to us." Steinberger has joined the Codex team at OpenAI and mentioned the direction of Codex's integration with OpenClaw: when the agent is smart enough, it will autonomously write code to enhance its capabilities, blurring the line between "programming" and "non-programming." "This is also why we ultimately decided to merge the two at OpenAI," he said. The multi-agent future he described envisions everyone having both a work agent and a personal agent, which can call upon each other while maintaining data boundaries.

During the interview, he also discussed the differences between the U.S. and China in AI agent applications: "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 had shown him a table with each employee's name and a column next to it asking, "What did you automate today?" actively encouraging employees to use AI to boost efficiency by 10 times. Meanwhile, in the U.S., some companies have restricted employee usage due to security concerns. Steinberger believes that neither approach is perfect, but the U.S. can learn something from China about embracing new technology more quickly. "This thing is so new; the only way to learn it is to actually try it and see it in action." During the GTC, he interacted with Chinese companies such as MiniMax, Dark Side of the Moon, and Tencent.