OpenClaw will be transferred to a soon-to-be-formed independent foundation and continue operating as an open-source project. In his first Bloomberg interview since joining OpenAI, founder Peter Steinberger said Nvidia and ByteDance have confirmed participation, Tencent is in talks, and he has also spoken with Microsoft.
Steinberger described his role as being like “Switzerland,” a neutral party. That framing reflects OpenClaw’s position in the industry: many companies want to use it, but few want a direct rival to control it. Moving the project under a foundation creates a structure where multiple companies can contribute without handing dominance to a single player.
Codex and OpenClaw are moving toward a combined product path
After joining OpenAI, Steinberger became part of the Codex team. In the interview, he said Codex and OpenClaw are converging. His view is that once an agent becomes smart enough, it will write code on its own to improve its own capabilities. The line between programming and non-programming work is getting thinner, and that is why OpenAI decided to bring the two together.
He also said he is personally using Codex to write all of OpenClaw’s code, which has doubled his productivity. Sam Altman had earlier called Steinberger a “genius” and said the future would involve a highly multi-agent setup, where people have both work agents and personal agents that can call each other without accessing each other’s data.
China usage is nearly twice the level seen in the United States
During GTC, Steinberger met with Chinese companies including MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Tencent, and said he saw several things that stood out. He said OpenClaw usage in China is almost double that of the US. He also named five major cloud players in China — Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, JD.com and Baidu — as companies that are broadly embracing OpenClaw.
Tencent has already launched an OpenClaw access tool directly inside WeChat, giving it reach to 1 billion monthly active users. Steinberger summed up one difference this way: in the US, some companies may fire employees for using OpenClaw; in China, some may fire employees for not using it. He added that one Chinese company showed him a table listing employee names alongside a column asking what had been automated that day, part of a push to use AI to raise efficiency by 10x. In contrast, many US companies still restrict employee use because of security concerns.
Nvidia ties now extend beyond governance into products
Nvidia’s role goes beyond joining the foundation. Steinberger said the relationship has already reached the product level. Jensen Huang had previously called OpenClaw “the next ChatGPT” at GTC. Steinberger is now working with Nvidia on NemoClaw, a security-focused agent solution for enterprises that is designed to give companies more control when deploying agents.