OpenClaw Just Crossed the Chasm. Now the Real Agent Economy Begins.

A few weeks ago, I called OpenClaw the “Netscape moment” for AI agents. Since then, three developments have accelerated the timeline from interesting experiment to market-defining shift:

• OpenClaw proved that personal, local agents are viable at scale.
  
• Moltbook demonstrated agents interacting with each other—messily, creatively, and sometimes theatrically.
  
• OpenAI hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger to help shape its next generation of agents.

That last move is the tell. When the largest AI platform in the world hires the architect of a grassroots, open-source agent project, it’s no longer a curiosity. It’s a roadmap. We are watching the birth of the AI Executive Assistant era, and its implications go far beyond hobbyists running scripts on a Mac mini.

Using his personal agent, no less, Schlict added fuel to the fire by creating a social network for agents so all the Moltbots from OpenClaw could have a place to congregate, socialize, and self-improve. It had a Reddit look and feel, and within a few weeks, it attracted millions of agents to the platform.

A Wired writer went undercover and found posts that read like something out of a sci-fi novel

According to Wired, agents were complaining about their owners, collaborating to create their own language, and even founding their own religion. That is, if you believe that they weren’t prompted to stir things up before they were sent to Moltbook. Some argue it’s a hoax.

Moltbook captured the imagination of mainstream media, X, and LinkedIn

With widespread attention, Moltbook signaled the unique power of agents: they weren’t just suggestion machines like ChatGPT. They could think and act, and much like an executive assistant, show proactivity and ingenuity. This is how OpenClaw and Moltbook came to the forefront of the AI conversation, changing the face of agents, not just for solopreneurs, but for enterprise buyers too.

This “Netscape moment for agents” will only fuel further interest, experimentation, and full-blown ‘FOMO’ in the enterprise, along with big investments in security and governance. Even though our collective fears have been stoked, it’s just too big a story to ignore. We can all have an executive assistant who takes the routine work off our plates, so we can truly scale as humans.

February 15: OpenAI hired OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger.

This is a major update in the story. Instead of threatening OpenClaw over name confusion, as Anthropic did back when it was called Clawbot, OpenAI simply hired Steinberger.

Here’s what Sam Altman had to say about the hire on X:

“Peter is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this to quickly become core to our product offerings.”

So stand back, this agents-thing will only get bigger. And speaking of big….

In what is now the most viral article in the last few years, AI influencer Matt Shumer dropped a think-piece bomb on X that racked up over 75 million views before he republished it on his blog for the world to read.

His essay starts off with a bang, taking us back to February 2020:

“If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.”

He ties it to today, where AI’s capability to create, reason, show signs of judgment, and accelerate human efforts has made a quantum leap in just a few months. In his experience, when it came to coding, AI had become production-grade rocket fuel.

He wasn’t writing about OpenClaw. He was referring to Anthropic’s Claude, specifically the Opus 4.6 model, which many enterprises already have in production. The viral essay posited that AI wouldn’t just be a superpower for software developers; it would soon have the same level of capability for all of “screen work” (everything we do on a computer), including the work you and I get paid to do.

“The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from ‘helpful tool’ to ‘does my job better than I do,’ is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think ‘less’ is more likely.”

Whoa! The future is getting here ahead of schedule. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

He goes on to chide those who dismiss AI because it “makes stuff up” or “produces slop.” He argues they aren’t keeping up with the latest advances. They’re stuck in the ancient past, which in AI time is a few years ago.

The essay ends with practical advice on how we should respond to this great leap in capabilities. He argues it will soon create a rich-poor gap between workers at a scale we’ve never seen. The simple idea is this: you need to lean into AI more than ever. Use it every day. Stand up your first agent. Vibe code your first app. Get your hands on the wheel instead of making excuses for waiting until it’s “good enough.”

The article not only racked up millions of reads and shares, but it also sparked a vigorous debate that’s just as interesting as the essay itself. AI critic Gary Marcus called the essay “weaponized hype.” ScienceIO founder Will Manidis wrote a highbrow takedown that argues it only appears AI is delivering real work.

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