Beyond OpenClaw - The Rise of Personal AI Agents

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome back to AI to ROI, the Big Story Edition. I'm Ray Rike, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and joining me as always is my co-host, Peter Buchanan.

**Peter Buchanan** (0:19)
Hi, I'm Peter Buchanan. I'm the managing partner of NewPlan, and Ray, this week, we are talking about something that went from zero to 1.5 million agents in action in two months, and has every major AI company scrambling to respond.

**Ray Rike** (0:38)
Well, sounds like you're talking about OpenClaw. It's interesting. It was a lonely, sole Australian developer who built it in about, I think it took more than an hour, but he built it in a few days back in November, and it sparked this entire new category of personal AI agents, or as detectives call them, claws. By the way, for the audience out there, one of my favorite podcasters, besides Peter Buchanan and Ray Rike, is Lex Friedman, and he had an amazing interview with Peter, the founder of OpenClaw back in February, but be prepared, it's a three hour long podcast, but well worth it.
By the way, just what is OpenClaw? It's an Oizon autonomous AI agent that's running on your computer and it's executing these multi-step tasks without waiting for you. So Peter, you know, there's a little bit of a spoiler alert here, and that is that OpenClaw actually proved something. It proved that there was millions of people out there who want an Oizon AI assistant right there beside them on their computer. But the harder question for me is whether companies, large enterprises, will actually allow employees to bring their agents to work. It's a little bit like, I still remember, my wife worked at JP Morgan, and when you first had smartphones come out, they would not let you bring your smartphone to work. Why? Because the security risks are real.
And in OpenClaw, those security risks are even heightened. So let's start with OpenClaw and actually, what it is exactly and why it exploded.

**Peter Buchanan** (2:22)
All right. So in November 2025, this Austrian fellow, Peter Steinberger, a superstar guy, really well known. He built the first version of OpenClaw incredibly quickly. He called it ClaudeBot, but then Anthropic called and he changed the name to MoteBot.

**Ray Rike** (2:42)
And then it was MoteBot initially, right?

**Peter Buchanan** (2:45)
Right. And then it became OpenClaw. So it had three names in about two weeks, but within two months, he'd renamed it twice. And he had one and a half million active agents chunking away.
It was a little bit more expensive than he expected when he started building it because to maintain it, it was costing him $10,000 a month. So Sam Altman called him a genius and he also opened his checkbook because he hired Steinberger in mid February to join OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. And they put OpenClaw into basically one of those open source foundations where anybody can work on it. And then the next closed version from OpenAI, whenever it shows up, they'll be being led by Mr. Steinberger. So Ray, what?

**Ray Rike** (3:37)
Peter, I can ask you a question because that channel noise said that Peter and OpenClaw was worth about a billion dollars when OpenAI bought them. Has that been confirmed?

**Peter Buchanan** (3:49)
I've never seen a number. I mean, I was actually quite curious about that because it's only him and he had a couple of helpers like so he could go to sleep that help keep the instances up. But I've never seen that number and God love him if he got a big number.

**Ray Rike** (4:09)
Okay. But a lot of our audience maybe doesn't know exactly what OpenClaws is at a more detailed level. So let me tell you why it's different. So OpenClaw is a self-hosted. So it's on your computer. It's not in the cloud like the large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic. It's a personal agent specific to you.
It can connect to any major AI model. So it's kind of user option. What model do you want to use? And it takes its commands through messaging apps. I think it started with WhatsApp and they added Telegram, iMessage, Slack and now 20 others. So you actually speak to your agent through the message app you're already using.
It's continuously browsing the web, reading and writing files and scheduling and executing tasks and it actually works when you're not at your computer. So you don't need to keep going back and forth and prompting the ALM. It's running 24 by 7 even when you're not there.

**Peter Buchanan** (5:12)
Right. So you better give it good instructions.
The uptake was fantastic and it wasn't just in the US. So the first thing that you started reading is that smart tech savvy people were saying, well, I don't want to put this thing on my computer with all my other stuff, so I'm going to buy another computer. There was this little boomblet of sales of Mac minis that were only running OpenClaws on them. So a few weeks ago in our newsletter, we actually had a chart of the Mac mini boomblet from all, you know, tracked by all the retailers. So we were cautious in the US. In China, not so much. So Baidu, the big retail and search company, they planned to embed OpenClaw into its main, their main smartphone app, and Tencent actually hosted setup sessions in Shenzhen that drew retirees, students, tech workers. So people were really, really excited.