OpenClaw to Establish Independent Foundation: NVIDIA and ByteDance Join, Tencent in Negotiations

On March 27, it was announced that OpenClaw will transition to a newly established independent foundation for continued open-source operations. Founder Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer, revealed in his first interview with Bloomberg since joining OpenAI that NVIDIA and ByteDance have confirmed their participation in the foundation, while Tencent is in negotiations and has also communicated with Microsoft. He mentioned that he is “trying to be Switzerland” in this matter. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously referred to Steinberger as a “genius” and stated, “The future will be extremely multi-agent, and supporting open-source is important to us.” Steinberger joined the Codex team at OpenAI and disclosed the integration direction between Codex and OpenClaw: when agents become intelligent enough, they will autonomously write code to enhance their capabilities, blurring the lines between “programming” and “non-programming.” “This is also why we ultimately decided to merge the two at OpenAI,” he explained. He envisions a future with multiple agents where everyone has both work and personal agents that can interact with each other while maintaining data boundaries. In 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 showed him a chart listing each employee’s name alongside a column titled “What was automated today?” actively encouraging employees to use AI to increase efficiency tenfold. In contrast, some companies in the U.S. have restricted employee usage due to security concerns. Steinberger believes that neither approach is perfect, but the U.S. can learn from China’s faster adoption of new technologies, stating, “This is too new; the only way to learn it is to actually use it and observe it.” During GTC, he had discussions with Chinese companies such as MiniMax, Dark Side of the Moon, and Tencent. (Bloomberg)