OpenClaw will establish an independent foundation: NVIDIA and ByteDance have joined, Tencent is in talks

According to 1M AI News monitoring, OpenClaw will transition into an upcoming independent foundation to continue open-source operations. Founder and Austrian developer Peter Steinberger revealed in his first interview with Bloomberg after joining OpenAI that NVIDIA and ByteDance have confirmed their participation in the foundation, and Tencent is in talks, having also communicated with Microsoft. He stated that he is 'trying to be Switzerland' in this matter. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously called Steinberger a 'genius' and mentioned that 'the future will be extremely multi-agent, and supporting open-source is very important to us.' Steinberger joined the Codex team at OpenAI and disclosed the integration direction of Codex and OpenClaw: when agents are smart enough, they will autonomously write code to enhance their capabilities, 'the boundary between programming and non-programming is disappearing, and this is also the reason we ultimately decided to merge the two at OpenAI.' The multi-agent future he envisions is one where everyone has both work agents and personal agents, which can call upon each other while maintaining their own data boundaries. In the interview, he also discussed the differences between China and the US in AI agent applications: 'In the US, some companies will fire you for using OpenClaw; in China, some companies will fire you for not using it.' He mentioned that Chinese companies have shown him a table listing every employee's name, with a column next to it stating 'What was automated today?' actively promoting employees to use AI to improve efficiency by tenfold. Meanwhile, in the US, some companies have restricted employee usage due to security concerns. Steinberger believes that both approaches are not perfect, but the US can learn something from China's faster embrace of new technology, 'This stuff is too new; 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, Dark Side of the Moon, and Tencent.