2026 began with an earthquake in the world of AI, and it did not come from any of the big technology companies, but from an unknown programmer and his open source project OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot). Not even two months have passed and we can say that the boom of this AI agent is reconfiguring the AI career, causing more and more companies to jump on the bandwagon. The last one was Perplexity.
Personal Computer. a month ago, Perplexity announced Computerwhich was a cloud-based tool capable of orchestrating agents using various models. The next step is Personal Computeryour own OpenClaw. can be left running on a Mac Mini and control it from another device, such as a mobile phone, exactly the same as OpenClaw, but with a simpler interface that does not require technical knowledge. Further user-friendly.
Another key aspect is that they focus on security, one of the delicate points of OpenClaw. Perplexity claims that with Personal Computer, “Every sensitive action requires your approval. Every action is logged. There’s an off switch.” At the moment Personal Computer is not available yet, but if you want to try it before anyone else you can sign up for the waiting list.
NVIDIA NemoClaw. Which is the most valuable company in the world has taken good note of the success of OpenClaw and a couple of days ago they announced that they will launch their own open source platform for enterprise AI agents, they will call it NemoClaw. This announcement is also important because it places NVIDIA in a position of direct competition against companies like Anthropic, OpenAI or Perplexity. This changes its position from a hardware supplier to a software competitor.
and OpenAI…The project had not even been three months old when OpenAI, not only bought it, but also hired its creator Peter Steinberger. It was not the only one who bid to achieve the viral success of the moment, Meta also tried, but OpenAI was the one that won the bid. Stenberger said the project would continue to remain “open and independent.”
This case is a good example of two things: how far a person can go with a good AI idea and how difficult, if not impossible, it is to compete in an ecosystem in which the competition is some of the largest and most valuable companies in the world. David against Goliath.
The agentic AI race. We spent a good part of 2025 watching AI agents take their first steps, many times with quite mediocre results. It was clear that agentic AI was getting a lot betterbut I don’t think anyone expected that the first viral hit would be carried out by an independent and open source project. OpenClaw not only succeeded, it has launched a new race in AI, one that seeks the ultimate custom AI agents.
OpenClaw has two barriers to entry, on the one hand requiring certain technical knowledge and on the other security. It is a very powerful agent, but sometimes unpredictable. Hence, Perplexity is appealing precisely to improve these two aspects. We’ll see who will be next.
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