It’s “phase two” of the AI boom, and the claws are out.
Back at the tail end of 2024, I wrote these words: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off. As the bloom came off the Generative AI rose in 2024, everyone started talking about AI agents as the Next Big Thing. Google, Apple, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon – all of them (and about a million startups) are trying to build user agents for both enterprise and consumer use cases. I’m a huge fan of the concept, but for now, it remains just that. Reasoning agents that book your travel, negotiate your insurance bills, or manage your calendar simply will not work if they are beholden to the same business models currently driving Big Tech.”
My prediction proved accurate – in 2025, anyway. But three months into 2026, it seems AI agents are not only everywhere, they’ve also got a mascot, and it’s a crustacean. Everyone in China, apparently, has gone all in on “raising lobsters” – using OpenClaw to automate nearly everything computer mediated. And as the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs alike are racing to become power users of new agentic tools that lets them prompt their ideas into reality.
“Across the planet, everyone is tinkering,” notes Om Malik, usually one of tech’s most skeptical observers. Malik highlights what is perhaps the most important features of this year’s breakout trend: It’s not controlled by the tech oligarchy of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and, more recently, OpenAI. OpenClaw, he writes, “represents a philosophy. The intelligence lives on your machine. You own it. You aim it. No subscription. No permission required.”
If this sounds familiar, you may have read my warning about the rise of generative AI three years ago: “We dream of genies, but who will they work for?” The piece lays out why I’m both excited and concerned about the potential of generative AI agents – they hold the promise of finally breaking us free of walled garden business models that have trapped all our data in profit-seeking amber. But if AI is driven by those same models, we may never have the chance to find out.
“Internet business models have been built to collect short term rent,” I wrote, then included a breakdown of OpenAI’s “terms of service” to prove my point. “Truly open systems rarely win over time,” I conclude, “regardless of whether the company uses the word “open” in its name.”
Add another one to the list: OpenClaw. Last month, aspiring tech oligarch OpenAI acquired OpenClaw. I understand why founder Peter Steinberger hitched his financial wagon to OpenAI’s rocket ship. He’s now a millionaire and his project will now have nearly unlimited resources. And OpenClaw has grown exponentially in the month since it became an “independent foundation” controlled by OpenAI. But let’s not forget – OpenAI itself was once an independent foundation “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
That didn’t last.
For the moment, open, user-controlled systems like OpenClaw are dominating the tech conversation across society. It feels exactly like the early web – everybody tinkering, unconstrained by the dictates of corporations or governments. But we’ve seen this movie before, and it’s always ended the same way: Early enthusiasm for something new – be it home brew computers, web browsers, mobile phones, social networks, or app stores – always consolidates into the hands of ruthlessly capital-efficient corporations. It’s just never happened as quickly as it did with OpenClaw. I guess we have AI to thank for that.
—
It seems 2026 has become the year of the agent. But