OpenAI Acquires OpenClaw: AI Agent Revolution Begins

What set OpenClaw apart, Chase argued, was its willingness to be "unhinged" -- a term he used affectionately. He revealed that LangChain told its own employees they could not install OpenClaw on company laptops due to the security risks involved. That very recklessness, he suggested, was what made the project resonate in ways that a more cautious lab release never could.

"OpenAI is never going to release anything like that. They can't release anything like that," Chase said. And so if you don't do that, you also can't have an OpenClaw." Chase credited the project's viral growth to a deceptively simple playbook: build in public and share your work on social media.

He drew a parallel to the early days of LangChain, noting that both projects gained traction through their founders consistently shipping and tweeting about their progress, reaching the highly concentrated AI community on X. On the strategic value of the acquisition, Chase was more measured. He acknowledged that every enterprise developer likely wants a "safe version of OpenClaw" but questioned whether acquiring the project itself gets OpenAI meaningfully closer to that goal.

He pointed to Anthropic's Claude Cowork as a product that is conceptually similar -- more locked down, fewer connections, but aimed at the same vision. Perhaps his most provocative observation was about what OpenClaw reveals about the nature of agents themselves. Chase argued that coding agents are effectively general-purpose agents, because the ability to write and execute code under the hood gives them capabilities far beyond what any fixed UI could provide.