OpenClaw to Establish Independent Foundation: NVIDIA and ByteDance Have Joined, Tencent in Negotiation

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, OpenClaw will transition to a soon-to-be-established independent foundation for continued open-source operations. Founder and Austrian developer Peter Steinberger revealed in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg after 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 stated that he is ‘trying to be Switzerland’ in this matter. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously referred to Steinberger as a ‘genius’ and emphasized that ‘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 smart enough, they will autonomously write code to enhance their own capabilities, blurring the lines between ‘programming’ and ‘non-programming.’ He explained that this is also why OpenAI ultimately decided 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 respective 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 so new that the only way to learn it is to actually use it and see it.’ During GTC, he had discussions with Chinese companies such as MiniMax, The Dark Side of the Moon, and Tencent.