The OpenClaw Foundation

Six months ago, OpenClaw was a single claw and a Discord server at Peter’s place in Austria. A weekend project that was built because, in his words, he was annoyed it didn’t exist and so he prompted it into existence. Today, it is a global movement with 4.5 million new claws being born every week, and the fastest growing repository in GitHub history. And now, a foundation.

Our Vision

Our vision is to bring people closer to AI. In service of human potential, not in place of it. Today AI feels distant and a little frightening, locked in someone else’s cloud, answering to someone else’s interests. We think the future is personal AI that actually does things. It runs on your machine, works with the apps that you already use, and answers to you and you alone.

Your agent, your machine, your rules. Just like you carry your own laptop, you should be able to own your AI. We are on a mission to bring the power of personal AI to the people by stewarding OpenClaw as open and independent.

Why a Foundation

OpenClaw is officially a 501(c)(3) American non-profit organization serving a global community. This structure matches what we have always been: open, independent, community-driven, and for the people.

The reason is simple: the foundation exists to protect OpenClaw and steward it as open and independent. The great open source projects of our time - Linux, Apache, Mozilla - endure because a neutral steward stands behind them. That is the role we are taking on to keep OpenClaw MIT licensed, open, and independent so that everyone building on it can trust it will be here for the long term.

Peter built this thing, and Peter keeps making the calls, especially the technical ones. Since joining OpenAI earlier this year, he has continued to steward OpenClaw as an open and independent project, and OpenAI has made a commitment to keep it that way.

The foundation is here to serve: good governance, stable funding, and paying the people who keep the claws alive.

Our ambition is for OpenClaw to be the Switzerland of AI. Neutral ground where every model and every lab can plug into the technology and collaborate on standards in the era of agents. That work is already underway in Foundation-convened councils on agent identity, agent profiles, evals, and enterprise deployment.

Full-Time Staff

For the first time, we have hired a full-time team, which we are scaling. Drawn from the OpenClaw community all over the world, our initial staff is made up of open source maintainers and people for whom our mission has become deeply personal.

Engineering: Vincent Koc (Chief Architect), Josh Avant, Patrick Erichsen, Dallin Romney, Jason Sy, Gideon Adegbesan

Operations: Jen Vescio (Partnerships), Matt Jasie (Finance), Hannes Rudolph (Community), Kelly Pike (Talent)

And behind them, the global community of volunteer maintainers and every clawtributor. Including thousands of people whose first ever pull request (or as Peter likes to call them “prompt requests”) landed in OpenClaw. We are inspired by the builders who are building alongside us every day.

We’re continuing to build and add more crustaceans to the tank. Our open roles:

Member of Technical Staff

Forward Deployed Engineer

Product Designer

Head of Developer Relations

Developer Relations (North America)

Developer Relations (APAC)

Marketing & Events Lead

Chief of Staff

If you’re passionate about the claw but don’t see a role that matches your skillset, apply to the OpenClaw Foundation Talent Network.

Partners

We’ve launched partnerships with some of the best technology companies and academic institutions in the world.

OpenAI supports inference, shipped Codex Security to harden the platform, and stood up Claw Labs, a team inside OpenAI led by Peter that works on shared product improvements. And now a major donor to the Foundation, OpenAI has committed to supporting the Foundation’s stewardship of OpenClaw as open and independent.

NVIDIA launched NemoClaw at GTC: one command installs OpenClaw with open Nemotron models and the OpenShell secure runtime, so anyone can run a private, always-on claw on their own hardware. Industrial leaders like Cadence, Siemens, Synopsys, and Dassault Systèmes are already building autonomous AI engineers on NemoClaw, compressing weeks of chip verification and simulation work into hours. And, startups are using it for everything from aircraft geometry to electric motor design. As Jensen Huang put it at GTC: “Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy.”

Microsoft announced Microsoft Scout at Build: always-on autopilot agents that work autonomously, with their own identity, and take work off your plate. The first of what Satya Nadella referred to at Build as “enterprise grade Claws,” Microsoft Scout is built with enterprise-grade security and controls, and powered by OpenClaw open-source technology, with Microsoft continuing to contribute directly upstream to OpenClaw.

University of Michigan became our largest donor and launched the Institute for Agentic Computing, an academic home for OpenClaw that will serve as a hub for researchers and developers applying agentic AI to advanced scientific discovery and engineering. The University is poised to lead the evolution and practical deployment of agentic technologies, acting as a critical hub within the international agentic network and supporting initiatives of national importance, such as The Genesis Mission for AI-driven scientific discovery.

Tencent added full-time maintainers on security, stability and ClawHub, plus a direct vulnerability-sync line with their internal security team. Atlassian and other enterprise partners pushed on deployment, auditability, identity boundaries and secret handling. Blacksmith gives us the runner capacity to test agent paths at the rate we ship. And Vercel, Cloudflare, Convex, and GitHub provide the infrastructure that keeps OpenClaw fast, safe, and always shipping.

And the network keeps growing: today the Foundation works day to day with more than 30 organizations across every major AI lab, cloud, and platform, in shared channels where the next generation of agent infrastructure is being built together.

When the largest technology companies and research universities in the world build on a community project and contribute back, that’s the open source flywheel working exactly as intended.

Donors

We are grateful for the generous support of our major donors including Offline Holdings, Lobster Computer Company, University of Michigan, OpenAI, and many more in the pipeline. Our donors understand that they are not just funding a project, they are funding a public good that benefits all of us.

The Ecosystem

OpenClaw is no longer just OpenClaw, it is an entire reef of claws which deliver both the user and developer experience. We have built powerful tools to drive one of the most advanced agentic engineering processes in the world such as ClawSweeper, Crabbox, Crabfleet, and more. And, ClawHub continues to be one of the largest agent skill sharing communities on the internet.

ClawCon continues to grow with 34 events across 16 countries in five months from San Francisco to Sao Paulo, Ankara to Nairobi, Tokyo to Dublin. Nearly 30,000 people have signed up to share demos, hack, learn, and come together. And, more cities are in the pipeline. Seattle is next on August 11th, grab a seat.

Behind those projects and events are thousands of developers and entrepreneurs betting their next idea on OpenClaw by building skills, channels, tools, and whole companies. And, behind them something bigger is happening. Millions of people are experiencing high agency software building for the first time: a computer that works for them and not the other way around. Many had never written a line of code before OpenClaw. For most of computing history software was something that happened to you. Now it is something you tell what to do.

There is a Cambrian explosion underway. We intend to keep feeding it. And, we will keep doing what we’ve always done: shipping.

Welcome to the age of the lobster. 🦞

• Dave & Peter