The OpenClaw-ification of AI

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, the open-clawification of AI, and before that in the headlines, the fight between Anthropics and the Pentagon heats up. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:39dailybrief.ai. And last note today, big apologies for missing the show yesterday. Our journey back from South America ended up being significantly longer and more complicated than we expected, not only because of the East Coast snowstorms, but because we also had an emergency deplaning in Manaus, Brazil, that led ultimately to the entire trip being more than 55 hours door-to-door. So what we're going to do this week is treat the Wednesday show as the off day, and we will have a normal show on Saturday. So get prepared for some weekend listening. Still, we have a lot to catch up on. So with that, let's dive in.

1:10We kick off today with a topic that could easily be a main episode. The Pentagon has handed Anthropic an ultimatum in what could be the most crucial battle for AI safety to date. Now, heading into this week, we had building reports that Anthropic's contract with the Department of Defense, or the DOW depending on who you ask, was in jeopardy over AI readiness. Anthropic was insisting that their technology should not be used to power autonomous weaponry or for the surveillance of Americans. At certain points in the reporting, it seemed like Anthropic had contracted on the basis that their technology would not be used to assist in any lethal exchange.

1:41The Pentagon, on the other hand, was insisting that tech companies should not have input on how technology is used in military operations. They have been pushing for each AI lab to provide their models with terms that allow quote, all lawful use, basically establishing the position that only U.S. law rather than tech company policy should be the limiting factor in the conduct of war. The conflict had, of course, erupted after reports that Anthropic's AI models had been used during the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The reporting has been unclear to what extent AI was used, but it appeared that Anthropic was furious that their technology was used in what was ultimately a lethal operation.

2:14In that context, Anthropic executives were summoned to a meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday to settle the dispute, and things did not go well. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei a Friday deadline to agree to their terms or face a government blacklist. And this is not just they would drop their contract. The threat was that Anthropic would be designated a supply chain risk and barred for use among military contractors as well. That designation had previously only been applied to foreign companies such as Huawei. New reporting substantially fleshes out the conflicting views.

2:45Sources familiar with Anthropic's position said they are not confident that their AI models are reliable enough to operate weapons without a human in the loop. They also note that there are no current laws dealing with how AI can be used in domestic surveillance. Hegsitz reportedly told Anthropic that they have until 501 on Friday to get on board or not. He also warned Anthropic that he would ensure that, quote, The Defense Production Act is invoked on Anthropic, compelling them to be used by the Pentagon regardless of whether they want or not. Most are taking this to mean the Pentagon would compel Anthropic to provide a version of Claude without guardrails trained into the model.

3:14The Defense Production Act does allow the U.S. government to dictate contract terms on goods and services deemed critical to national security. However, it has rarely been invoked against the will of individual companies and is more typically used to order entire sectors to prioritize the production of certain goods to fulfill government orders. For example, it was invoked during the 2021 California wildfires to increase the production of fire hoses and during the pandemic to boost the supply of ventilators. Katie Sweeten, a former liaison for the Justice Department to the Department of Defense, noted that Hegg says threats are kind of contradictory, telling CNN, I would assume we don't want to utilize the technology that is a supply chain risk, right?

3:47So I don't know how you square that. What it sounds like is that the supply chain risk may not be a legitimate claim, but more punitive because they're not acquiescing. Despite being tense, sources said the meeting was cordial and that there were no raised voices. Hegseth even praised Anthropics models, which has been one of the undercurrents of the story. The Pentagon seems to believe that Anthropics technology is so far ahead of the competition that it can't be replaced by another supplier. The Pentagon has standing contracts with OpenAI, Google, and XAI. However, XAI is the only one to agree to all lawful uses standard across both classified and unclassified settings.

4:19CLAWD is the only model currently cleared for use in classified settings, according to Axios. Sources familiar with Anthropic's thinking said that they have no plans to buckle to the Pentagon's demands. Their official statement was polite but firm, commenting, We continued good-faith conversations about our usage policy to ensure Anthropic can continue to support the government's national security mission, in line with what our models can reliably and responsibly do. Meanwhile, a Pentagon spokesperson said, This has nothing to do with surveillance and autonomous weapons being used. You can't lead tactical ops by exception.

4:47As of Wednesday, Axios reports that the Pentagon is taking preparatory steps towards labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk. They've reached out to major contractors, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to determine if they have any critical dependencies on Anthropics technologies. Now, the reason that this is so important and, like I said, could easily be a main episode, and who knows, might need to be at some point, is that there's much more than Anthropics'$200 million contract at stake. The dispute goes right to the heart of the debates around AI safety that have been raging on the internet for the past decade.

5:13We are no longer talking about hypotheticals, but a very practical question of whether AI labs or the US government should have the final say on how military AI is deployed. Semaphore writer Reed Albergade commented, The most likely conclusion of this saga is that the Pentagon forces Anthropic to comply using the Defense Production Act. In some ways, this means both sides get what they want. The Pentagon no longer has restrictions on how it can use Claude, and Anthropic gets to save face even if it ends up complying with the Pentagon's demands. For some, this would be a very unsatisfying conclusion.

5:42Lawfare Media wrote, The terms governing how the military uses the most transformative technology of the century are being set through bilateral haggling between a defense secretary and a startup CEO with no democratic input and no durable constraints. Congress should be setting these rules and it should do so in a hurry. Obviously, this story continues to evolve and is something we will watch. But for now, we move over to one of Anthropik's big competitors in OpenAI, where reporting suggests that their Stargate project has stalled out. Project Stargate was announced last January and was one of the first in catalyzing events that kicked off the AI infrastructure boom.

6:13Sam Altman went to the White House to announce the half-a-trillion-dollar data center investment. Also in attendance were SoftBank's Masayoshi Sun and Oracle's Larry Ellison. Stargate set the tone for data center investments moving forward. Prior to that, hyperscalers had sort of been hedging their bets, being cautious of overbuilding, but the announcement of half a trillion dollars in spending was Sam Altman's declaration that he was going to build AI compute on a civilizational scale and everyone else should get with the program. And yet, despite the grandiose narrative, the project had challenges from the start.

6:40Indeed, the day it was announced, Elon Musk tweeted, they don't actually have the money. And although we know Elon has a particular axe to grind here, that did seem to at least be partially the case, with reporting later in the year suggesting the project was struggling to get financing in place. Now, however, the information reports that the entire Stargate project is stalling out. Their sources claim that the joint venture still hasn't been staffed up and that there is no data center development under the Stargate banner. In fact, the sources state that the joint venture began falling apart within weeks of the announcement due to a lack of leadership and coordination.

7:09OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank couldn't agree on who would do what, and so the project languished. Stymied OpenAI sought to develop data centers independently, but lenders apparently balked at the prospect of multi-billion dollar loans tied to an unproven company. Months later, of course, OpenAI circled back to partnerships and began developing data centers in collaboration with both Oracle and SoftBank, but none of the projects involve all three Stargate participants. There's a lot of nuance here, but ultimately the issue is that the scale and speed of the build-out has fallen short of OpenAI's ambitions.

7:35They originally targeted having 10 gigawatts in Stargate commitments signed by the end of 2025, but as we stand in early 2026, OpenAI has 6 gigawatts under contract with Oracle, and 2 gigawatts with SoftBank. The projects have all been hit with delays, and only one is known to be partially operational at this stage. Ultimately, all of this may be less dramatic than it seems, and just the challenge of doing things on such an unprecedented scale. Sachin Khadi, who works on compute scaling at OpenAI, weighed in, writing, Stargate is the umbrella brand for our compute strategy. It's about mobilizing the full ecosystem to deliver a step change in global AI compute.

8:07And over the past few quarters, that vision has become a reality. We exited 2025 with around 2 gigawatts of available compute, and a model designed to scale, long-term capacity agreements, purpose-built co-located deployments, and deep collaboration on next-generation data center design. Compute leadership is the foundation of research and product velocity, and Stargate is how we build what comes next. Overall, I don't really know what to make of this one, but the reason it's worth paying attention to if for no other reason than you know, that Wall Street, as it tries to figure out what to make of this entire space, is going to be watching it closely.

8:39Speaking of Wall Street, we turn finally today to Nvidia, who absolutely crushed earnings, delivering another record quarter for revenue. Wednesday night's earnings left no room for interpretation. The AI chip boom is still in full swing. Nvidia's revenue was up 73 % annualized to reach$68.1 billion, exceeding expectations by a massive 11 percentage points. They also guided even higher growth for the current quarter, projecting a 77 % annualized revenue gain. Data center business grew even faster than top-line revenue, coming in at 75 % growth. NVIDIA also noted that they're still assuming zero revenue from China in their forecasts, so revenue could see another big boost if exports start flowing.

9:16CEO Jensen Huang remarked that AI demand is going from strength to strength, commenting, The demand for tokens in the world has gone completely exponential. I think we're all seeing that, to the point where even our six-year-old GPUs in the cloud are completely consumed and the pricing is going up. Still, NVIDIA also disclosed massive new backstops for the AI build-out. They've now provided$3.5 billion worth of guarantees to companies developing data centers, four times the amount they disclosed in the previous quarter. These guarantees allow smaller neocloud companies to access debt on more favorable terms.

9:45However, if AI demand falters, NVIDIA could be required to take over leases and the operation of data centers in a struggling market. NVIDIA did not disclose which companies they gave these new guarantees to. AMD recently gave a similar guarantee to Crusoe, pledging$300 million, suggesting these arrangements are becoming more common. While the backstop adds marginal pressure on NVIDIA's balance sheet, ultimately these deals are pretty modest compared to the booming profits. Jensen also weighed in on the recent drawdown in software stocks, arguing that the markets got it wrong. He restated his view that existing software firms will build agentic features on top of their products, but their value as systems of record and databases will remain.

10:19He said, All of these tools that we use today, whether it's Cadence or Synopsys or ServiceNow or SAP, these tools exist for a fundamentally good reason. These agentic AI will be intelligent software that uses these tools on our behalf and help us be more productive. Nobody's going to serve us better than ServiceNow, and they're going to come up with agents that are really fine-tuned and optimized for the work that uses the tools that they have. In the end, we need the tools to finish their work and put the information back in a way we can understand. Now, despite the rosy outlook, the market response was a little underwhelming.

10:47NVIDIA stock gained 3 % in after-hours trading once earnings were announced, but fell below its closing price later in the evening. Ultimately, right now, I just think that markets are completely unmoored. In general, but especially when it comes to AI. And there's basically no better evidence for that than its response to this NVIDIA announcement. In any case, friends, that is where we will end the headlines for today. Next up, the main episode.

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14:27Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. I am finally back in the studio after not only a couple weeks abroad in South America, but also three non-stop days of travel. I think I can say fairly confidently that I have never in the entire time I've been doing this show, been as disconnected from the AI news as I was for the last three days. And so coming back to it, as I was looking through all of the news that I had missed, the big question for this show was going to be, what was the most important theme that I had missed that I wanted to focus this first main episode on? The answer, I believe, is the open clawification of AI.

14:59A phenomenon where more and more products in the AI space are starting to resemble open claw in ways that I believe are about something much bigger than just trying to compete with a hot project. So let's talk first about some of the feature announcements that inspired this show. Right at the top, we have a Claude Code's new remote control feature. It is exactly what it sounds like and brings a thing that people have wanted forever and that numerous startups have built around to the mainstream, which is the ability to code with Claude Code from your phone. On Tuesday, Anthropic posted, new in Claude Code remote control.

15:32Kick off a task in your terminal and pick it up from your phone while you take a walk or join a meeting. Clawed keeps running on your machine and you can control the session from the Clawed app or clawed.ai slash code. Some of the first reactions were to joke about the social life implications of this. Cremio wrote, Anthropic just saved the San Francisco nightlife. And yet for most, the very clear comparison was in fact OpenClaw. AppClub's MetaPreston writes, This is the only reason I wanted ClawedBot. Investor and content creator Sarah Dietschy writes, Okay, I guess I don't need to try ClawedBot anymore.

16:03Guy L. Breton calls it OpenClaw for grownups. And Allie K. Miller says, This is the feature I've been waiting for. I work from my phone for hours every day. Remote control is about to turn me into a clawed code maniac. So one of the big things that people love about OpenClaw is the ability to interact with your agents via Telegram. And that's not because Telegram is necessarily the best experience when you're sitting in front of a computer. It's because using Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever chat app you've connected it to makes it so that you can interact with your agents on the go. This was certainly one of the first things that attracted me to OpenClaw, was the ability to have an on-the-go coding agent so I could keep working on my projects when I wasn't sitting in front of the laptop.

16:41Lots of other people clearly felt similarly. Nate Herc writes, Clawed code just added what everyone wanted. With remote control, you essentially have clawed code in your pocket so that you can check in on progress and continue to assign work as you're out and about. Some even went so far as to argue that the use cases for OpenClaw in this new remote control feature might actually end up being a little bit different. They wrote, CloudCode is your work engine. It's a professional terminal tool. It lives in your code base to write functions, run tests, and open PRs while you walk the dog. OpenClaw is your life engine.

17:09It's an always-on butler. It's better for managing your calendar, booking flights, or texting your mom. Why the remote control is different? First is native versus messaging. OpenClaw talks to you through Telegram or WhatsApp. CloudCode remote control gives you a dedicated web or mobile terminal bridge to your local hardware. Deep context. CloudCode is aware of your specific dev environment. It knows your repo, your node modules, and your local CLI tools. Session vs. Butler You boot up Claude Code for a work session, OpenClaw stays running 24-7 on your machine or VPS. From a pragmatic usage perspective, use Claude Code to start a heavy refactor, head to a meeting, and check the diffs on your phone.

17:43Use OpenClaw to stay on top of your notifications and general digital existence while you're away from your keyboard. If you want to code from your pocket with surgical precision, get Claude Code. If you want a 24-7 digital butler, keep OpenClaw. Now, what I don't totally agree with here is the idea that OpenClaw is only for these sort of personal use cases like managing your calendar or booking flights. In fact, as I mentioned in my video from a couple weeks ago about my OpenClaw setup, my most useful agents are my research agents that are running 24-7 and updating information that's both useful for this show as well as for some of our ecosystem projects like AIDB Intelligence.

18:16But I think two things. First of all, the points about why this is going to be so valuable to people from a coding perspective, because it plugs into the main system that people are already using in the form of clawed code, is I think true. One of the reasons I believe that I found myself using my remote coder OpenClaw agent a little bit less is the context gap between it and where I'm doing most of my other projects. The second thing that I think is relevant about InterNoun's post is that even if one doesn't agree with the idea of how OpenClaw is characterized here, the actual underlying point is that we're in a broader paradigm shift of agentification and that there are going to be different tools and different platforms that have similar types of setups and similar types of interactive modes, but with very different use cases.

18:58Whatever the use cases end up being, remote control hit like gangbusters. Claude Code PM Noah Zweben had to come back to Twitter the day after the announcement to apologize for the capacity issues that they had run into on their end and to ensure that a broader rollout was coming. For some, remote control was just further evidence of how fast Anthropic is moving. Anonymous AI rumor account, I Rule the World, writes, Anthropic have now shipped OpenClaw. Dario and the gang are unfathomably ahead and their velocity is insane. It's a fair observation that they may have reached escape velocity, crushing every benchmark, eating enterprise, Department of War begging.

19:31One of the labs made a huge breakthrough. Still others like LLM junkie Amwill noted that what mattered here wasn't so much Anthropic picking up on clawed code features, but starting to see the new primitives of a new modality of AI coming to the fore. They write, this is the first official phone-to-local machine integration from any major AI lab, but not the last. This will become widely adopted. Anthropic, however, was not done. Just one day later, they returned to X to announce a new feature, this time for co-work, called Scheduled Tasks. Once again, it was exactly what it sounds like. They wrote, Claude can now complete recurring tasks at specific times automatically.

20:10A morning brief, weekly spreadsheet updates, Friday team presentations. They also write, It gets better with plugins, which give co-work domain expertise across design, engineering, operations, and more. Also, we're adding a new customized tab in your co-work sidebar, one place to manage your plugin skills and connectors. Now, going back to the idea of the clawification of AI, if you've listened to my episodes about OpenClaw or if you've tried it out yourself, you'll know that a big part of the magic is the way that it interacts with scheduled tasks. First, OpenClaw agents have something called a heartbeat, which is basically a reminder of the time interval of which you can set, but which is every 30 minutes by default, where effectively the agent reminds itself to remember its mission and to go keep working if it perhaps has lapsed in the previous period of time since the last heartbeat.

20:53On top of that are cron jobs, where basically you can tell an agent to do a specific thing at a specific time. When you dig into OpenClaw, it turns out that a lot of what the magic is is just being able to schedule tasks at certain times. Across my five project manager agents, they all have different schedules for the couple times a day when they check in with me either to remind me of all the to-do lists or to go interact with external sources to find the state of different projects. And so this idea of scheduled tasks feels once again, not like Anthropic trying to compete with OpenClaw, but instead recognizing a new primitive in-agentic AI.