OpenClaw will establish and independently operate the “Lobster Foundation”! Nvidia and ByteDance confirm they are joining

OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, after joining OpenAI, for the first time accepts a Bloomberg interview, revealing that OpenClaw will hand operations over to an independent foundation, with Nvidia and ByteDance already confirmed to join and Tencent currently in talks. He also disclosed that OpenClaw’s usage in China is nearly twice that of the United States.
(Background: Sam Altman personally recruited! OpenClaw founder joins OpenAI; the personal AI agent “quickly becomes a core product”)
(Additional background: Huang Renxun’s full GTC2026 speech: AI demand reaches several trillion dollars, compute power jumps 350x, and OpenClaw makes every company become AaaS)

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• Codex and OpenClaw are coming together
• The usage of OpenClaw in China is twice that of the United States
• Huang Renxun bets on OpenClaw

OpenClaw, the OpenClaw that’s making AI agents go mainstream, will set up an independent foundation to take over operations.

In a Bloomberg interview, the founder Peter Steinberger revealed that OpenClaw will be transferred to a newly formed independent foundation, continuing to operate in an open-source manner. Nvidia and ByteDance have already confirmed their participation, Tencent is in the process of negotiations, and Steinberger has also had discussions with Microsoft.

Peter Steinberger said he has a very clear role: “I’m trying to play Switzerland (the neutral party) in this matter.”

What’s easy to understand is that OpenClaw’s position in the industry is extremely delicate: everyone wants to use it, but no one wants a competitor to monopolize it. With a foundation-based development model, individual vendors can each demonstrate their capabilities and do their own work.

Codex and OpenClaw are coming together

After Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI, he joined the Codex team. In the interview, he described the fusion direction of the two products, saying that when agents are smart enough, they will write code on their own to strengthen their capabilities—“the boundary between ‘programming’ and ‘non-programming’ is disappearing.”

This is also why we made the final decision at OpenAI to merge the two

He said that he is an experimenter himself, and is using Codex to write all the code for OpenClaw, doubling productivity.

Sam Altman previously called Peter Steinberger a “genius” and said, “In the future, it will be extremely multi-agent; supporting open source is important to us.” He described the future of “multiple agents” as having everyone’s work agent and also an individual agent, where the two can call each other without reading each other’s data.

The usage of OpenClaw in China is twice that of the United States

During GTC, Peter Steinberger exchanged ideas with Chinese companies such as MiniMax, the Dark Side of the Moon, and Tencent, and also saw some things that left a strong impression on him.

OpenClaw’s usage in China is nearly twice that of the United States. China’s top five cloud giants—Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, JD.com, and Baidu—are fully embracing OpenClaw. Tencent has even directly launched an OpenClaw access tool on WeChat, reaching 1 billion monthly active users.

In the interview, Peter Steinberger pointed out the fundamental difference between China and the U.S.: “In the U.S., if you use OpenClaw, you might get fired. But in China, if you don’t use it, you’ll be fired.”

He said a certain Chinese company showed him a table listing every employee’s name, with a column next to it that says, “What have you automated today?” It actively encourages employees to use AI to raise efficiency by 10x, while in the U.S., many companies—out of safety concerns—have limited employees’ ability to use it.

Peter Steinberger said both sides’ approaches aren’t perfect. But he observed that the U.S. can learn some things faster from China’s embrace of new technology: “This is too new; the only way to learn it is to actually use it and see it in practice.”

Huang Renxun bets on OpenClaw

Nvidia isn’t just a foundation member—now the two sides’ cooperation has already gone deep into the product line. Previously, at GTC, Huang Renxun said OpenClaw is the “next ChatGPT.” Now Peter Steinberger has already partnered with Nvidia to develop NemoClaw, a safety agent solution designed specifically for enterprises, giving companies more control when deploying agents.