Ep 715: OpenAI's OpenClaw Acquisition And Anthropic's Disastrous 2026

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You've definitely heard the kind of recent news of openclaw now one of the most famous AI products ever. It's an open source autonomous agent that you can literally give your digital life to, and it can quite literally check off your TO dos while you sleep well, if you're feeling brave enough with your computer and your credentials. And you've also probably heard of the much more recent news now that OpenAI Aqua hired the OpenClaw founder and the project itself. So ChatGPT is probably about to get a lot more agentic soon. But the news you probably haven't heard is the nuance of what's been bubbling beneath the hype radar. And this whole story, I think is indic of a much larger yet silent shift that OpenAI is taking anthropic's lunch money when it comes to developer attention and sentiment. So on today's show it is hot Take Tuesday. After all, we're going to not just break down the details behind the recent OpenAI acquisition, but also tell the bigger story that I think Anthropic is losing ground in the only area that it's actually been trying to compete in. I think OpenAI AI is going to capitalize and retake some of that market share. All right, let's get into it. I hope you're excited for today's show. I am if you're new here. Welcome. My name is Jordan Wilson. Welcome to Everyday AI. So this is a daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday business leaders like you and me make sense of the non stop AI developments and helps us hopefully focus on things that can grow our companies in our career. So if you listen or pay attention to AI at all, you know it is non stop. So that is what we try to do with the unedited, unscripted everyday AI show. So if you do want the daily AI news, we always have that. That's in today's newsletter, but let's get into it. Actually, no, before I do service announcement, make sure if you haven't already, go check out episodes 712 and 7 13. That is our 2026 AI predictions and roadmap series. This is the culmination of literally thousands of hours of work over the last 12 or 13 months. And if you really take your time and digest everything in these episodes, I think it is really going to serve as a great blueprint for what comes next. All right, so let's get into the big story here. Yeah, if you've been hiding under a big seashell on the beach, maybe you missed this big lobster, this big quadbot, you know, rolling around. So let's get to some of the big details first, and then we'll unpack this story a lot more as we go on. So the most recent news was on Sunday. It was announced that OpenAI, essentially Aqua, hired Open Claw creator Peter Steinberger. So technically, it wasn't an acquisition, it was an Aqua hire. But we'll get into that a little bit later. And this really started, right, this push and what I think ultimately ended up kind of putting this acquisition in maybe OpenAI's lab. Well, it was actually Anthropic. So reportedly they kind of made some legal threats on the name, and I'm going to tell you why. And this deal, I think, is much more about a single product. It is much more than Open Claw. Right. I think that this deal actually is going to help reshape the agent landscape, which is the AI race in general and developer loyalty and also the 2026 IPO race between Anthropic and OpenAI, both who might go public first and who is ultimately going to be able to get a better valuation once they do go public. So on today's show, I'm going to tell you how Anthropic had the most viral AI agent project and they fumbled it to OpenAI. I'm going to tell you why I think developers are abandoning Claude at a rate we've never seen before. And I'm going to lay out what this means for the agent era, the IPO race, and who leads AI going forward. So this started more on Anthropics Watch. Right? So Open Claw, that's what it's called now, was originally started as claudebot. And the Peter, the developer, you know, kind of early on kind of talked about that that's what it was for. It was a way to give Anthropics models a different kind of harness, a different way to, you know, use some of their agentic capabilities from the models, from the Claud models themselves. So it was kind of modeled after the Anthropics, you know, AI offerings. So it started as claudebot. So this is important. Cl A, B WD bot. So a little different than C, L, A, U, D, E. But if you're listening on the podcast, it might have sounded like the same thing. And that is also what Anthropic lawyers allegedly thought as they essentially sent some letters and said, hey, you got to change this thing, right? You can't use the word Claude bot, even though it was spelled differently and even though it was one of the biggest, I think one of the biggest reasons why Anthropic was really starting to clean up in November and December. On the API side, yes, Claude code was, was released and updated around the same time, going very viral. You had Claude cowork similarly. Right. But I think that Claude bot, right, And I have, I have it wrong on my notes there. It's. It's now now already accrued 200,000 GitHub stars. So it is one of AI's biggest open source movements ever, right? A. An open source, you know, little lobster bot that runs on your computer. You give it access and it can just go and work and just go do, you know, different tasks autonomously. But it started kind of with the ball in Anthropic score. Obviously, there is no official tie in, but people that were using this viral product, the model essentially defaulted to Anthropic, which meant Anthropic was making a ton, presumably. Right. We don't see any official reports, but, you know, people are signing up for Anthropic, you know, licenses by the thousands. Right. Every single day, as this thing was getting more and more viral, you know, I've been watching it myself, I've been seeing it. I've even been looking at, you know, Google search trends, right? People were flocking just to get more, you know, Claude plans or to, you know, hook up to Anthropic's API so they could use this Claude bot. Because. Because a lot of people didn't really know or understand well that you could technically use any model and it defaulted to Anthropic, which was kind of a big deal. And then over time, as the developer had to change the name, it did change temporarily for like 48 hours to multbot, but then it ended up on Open Claw. And, you know, there was a little side story there. He said that he did reach out to, to Sam Altman to kind of make sure that even using the name open was okay because he didn't want to have to change the name again. And you know, he posted on Twitter that, hey, I did check with Sam Altman and He said using OpenClaw was not going to be a problem. Like, apparently it was using claudebot was a problem with Anthropic. So here's kind of the timeline. So this wasn't even launched until November. So that's when Peter Steinberger launched cloudbot. But this by default on Claude's API. And that's important. In January, that's when Anthropic's legal team was reportedly demanding a rename, citing the Claude trademark similarity. And then Steinberger said that he rebranded to Mobot on a 5am call after being told that if he didn't, lawyers would get involved, essentially. Then it went wild. Scammers hijacked the abandoned Claude bot handles and ran a $16 million crypto fraud scheme. And then a few days ago. Right, well, and then after the, you know, 48 hour mult bot, that's when it changed into Open Claw and picked up a lot of steam after that. And then it was Sunday, So just about two days ago that OpenAI essentially completed this, you know, aqua hire and moved OpenClaw to an independent foundation. And they did say that they are going to keep the Open Claw project open source. And that is very important. And I'm going to get into that later on the show. So Sam Altman was kind of gushing right over Steinberger and he did say that he will lead what OpenAI calls the next generation of personal agents. So also he reportedly, Steinburner Steinberger weighed, you know, multiple acquisition offers, including from both OpenAI and Meta, before ultimately choosing OpenAI. So the project itself is reportedly going to transition to an open, AI funded independent foundation and stay fully open source. Right. And it was kind of interesting to watch this unfold over the last few months. Right, because it seemed like when the project started to kick off, you know, it was very, just anthropic centric. Right. Everything was anthropic, anthropic, anthropic, Claude, Claude, Claude. And it almost seemed like the two were propelling each other. But I will say, even before this aqua hire from OpenAI, it kind of shifted. And even Steinberger himself, you know, talked a couple of weeks ago that he was using OpenAI's Codex model actually to build the viral when it was called claudebot. You know, there's a couple, you know, pictures that have gone kind of viral with him sitting in front of a computer, you know, having a lot of instances of OpenAI's codecs open. And I do think that that's maybe even before this acquisition. That's when I kind of started to see this change. And I've, you know, I've been using cloud code since it came out. I use Claude Cowork. I love both of those products. But like, I, I don't understand how Codex is so good. Right. Again, I've been saying this all week. I always, I always have Codex running, even when I'm recording this show. Right. It is so good and so impressive, especially with the new Codex 5.3 model. So it is going to be interesting to see what OpenAI's plans are over the long run with how they're going to continue to develop claudebot. You know, and one of the reasons that, you know, it was said that he ended up choosing OpenAI was, well, number one, so the project could be fully funded and he could work on that, you know, when he wanted to. But also, well, the opportunity to build the next generation of personal agents. So presumably this play, right? And you know, a lot of people are wondering, hey, is this the first, you know, $1 billion one person company that we heard that AI would allow someone to create? Well, maybe, Right. I'm sure we'll see more detail soon of exactly what that acquisition number was. Right. But be pretty wild, right? We've been hearing now for a couple of years that, oh, AI would allow someone to create a one, you know, one employee, $1 billion company. So we'll see what the acquisition price was. But, you know, ultimately it seems like Steinberger is going to kind of have a dual focus. So he'll hopefully be able to focus on continuing to build Open Claw. But then there may be some other, you know, projects or related projects, maybe in open cloth or enterprise or something like that. But there's a lot more that I want to get into and I think if nothing else, this just shows OpenAI's commitment to multi agent systems. Right. I think that's another reason. You know, part of it, I think was the timing, part of it's the technology. You know, obviously Steinberger had, you know, a pretty big exit a couple of years ago. So he's a very accomplished, you know, entrepreneur, knew what he was doing. But I think it's partially the right place at the right time with the right appetite from people. Right. As an example, LangChain, you know, so. So agents are not new. Open source agent projects aren't new. You know, there's thousands of them, you know, there's literally dozens of them popping up every day, hundreds of them popping up a week. But I think it was just the right time, the right place. And I think that this is going to ultimately shape the agent scene going forward because for whatever reason, this is the product, the AI agent product that eventually blew the lid off of it. Right? Because like I said, LangChain's been around for multiple years. There's been official agent offerings from Google, OpenAI obviously anthropic, you know, Microsoft Copilot, but nothing has really taken off in public like this has. Obviously part of it is because of its open source nature, right? You can technically download the project for free, you can download open source models for free if you have a powerful enough computer and you can literally get this thing running non stop for no cost. So I do think that that is part of the appeal, but part of it is also the open source community and the fact that Steinberger was shipping like crazy, right, daily updates with, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 new features. So you know, what probably required a lot of duct tape and a lot of, you know, tinkering maybe back in November, December. It is a much different, much more mature product right now. And I think that OpenAI saw that and I do think, you know, you have to look at a potential marriage here between a maybe enterprise version of, you know, openclaw and like I said, maybe that's not an open source product. Probably not if it's at the enterprise version. But I do assume that OpenAI does have to have some plans for this outside of it just being a continued open source project that they continue to support financially. Right. Presumably, like I said, Steinberger is going to be, you know, lending some of his, you know, expertise and creative vision to helping OpenAI develop even more on the agentic side inside of ChatGPT. But I do think the new Codex Spark model, right, marrying that with OpenClaw could lead to some pretty impressive things because that new model haven't talked about a lot on the show. It's, it's mind bogglingly good. It is so, so fast. A thousand tokens per. Yeah, there's no delay, right? Even as I'm looking on my screens here at Codex and Claude Code both running, it's like they're fast, right? But still it can take multiple hours for something to run. So when you can combine this architecture with a project that has been supported and has taken off like this, I really think that there's a lot that can be done. Foreign. Moves too fast to follow, but you're expected to keep up. Otherwise your career or company might lag behind while AI native competitors leap ahead. 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But here's the thing that's had me scratching my head for the last 40ish hours. It seemed like the original claudebot in anthropic was the perfect combination. So if you are a little bit newer to the, you know, AI race, for the most part, Anthropic has always been seen as the developer's model, right? Google Gemini is kind of the multimodal, you know, beast of a model that works well Inside of workspace OpenAI known for a lot of things, but I think they're really known on the consumer side, you know, leading the pack and becoming synonymous with AI. Microsoft Copilot may be known a little bit more in the enterprise, but Anthropic has always been known as a developer's model and more recently over the last year, an agentic model. So when claudebots kind of defaulted to Anthropic's API, it seemed like, well, this open source project was doing work for Anthropic, making it probably a lot of money, giving it a lot of, you know, good and positive press and putting it in a good light for showcasing what its model was actually capable for. And for many developers it was the killer app that turned Claude into an actual productivity tool, you know, before, you know, even Claude Cowork was released while there was Claude Bot. So Anthropic had the technology, the community and the relationships, but they chose lawyers instead, right? The fact that Anthropic didn't do the no brainer thing and just say, yeah, let's get behind this. This is literally we couldn't pay, you know, we could pay millions and millions of dollars and we can never see an opportunity like this. The fact that they instead went the lawyer route and said, hey, Clawd is too close to C L A U D E. I do think ultimately we'll see how it plays out, but I think that could be a mistake that ends up and I'm not exaggerating here. This could be a mistake that ends up costing Anthropic hundreds of billions of dollars. That is with a B choosing to try to bully an open source project that was probably bringing them in already millions of dollars of revenue. Yeah, you gotta protect your brand. I get it. Right. But why not reach out and try to figure out a partnership, right? Try to extend a hand or just do what Sam Altman apparently did and said, yeah, you can change it to Open Claw, sure. Right. Not a good move. So Anthropic told Steinberger to rename it ASAP or their lawyers would get involved. According to some. Some conversations that have taken a place that have taken place. And like I said, OpenAI took the the opposite approach and they just fully supported it. And Sam Altman even backed the project early while Anthropic treated its biggest fans as a threat. And it has been an extremely successful project. Like I said, over 200,000 stars on GitHub. And kind of the way that Steinberger compared kind of this new structure with OpenAI going forward is kind of like the Chrome and Chromium relationship, right? Chrome obviously closed source, but they have a version of Chrome called Chromium, which is what essentially the entire industry builds off of. Right? Perplexity's browser based on Chromium. OpenAI's browser based on Chromium. Microsoft's browser based on Chromium. So maybe that could be what happens in the future. Maybe most agents are running on Openclaw. So here's where I think that this gets interesting. OpenAI gets the talent, the community and the ecosystem now in one move. And here's the thing, you have to be smart about how you shape this project moving forward. And presumably it's going to be optimized to run best on OpenAI's models. Right. It does appear that it is going to continue as a supported open source project. I know a lot of people are worried about that and what comes along with that is, well, the ability to choose whatever model you want. But I would assume that updates and just overall compatibility will probably be prioritized a little bit toward OpenAI's models. It only makes sense, right? In the same way Chrome and Chromium probably best optimized for all of the different Google products, right? Probably. You know, Gmail runs really, really good there versus on other browsers, right. It just makes sense because when you're building, you're always going to be using internal tools first and they're going to be the most compell compatible. So it's actually really big. Even if. Right. Even if OpenClaw does say a completely unaffiliated open source project, it does mean big things because I do assume that it'll be defaulted now to the GPT models versus kind of how it was previously defaulted to the Anthropic models. So how will anthropic and OpenAI respond here? Well, today, like I said, OpenClaw is model agnostic and you can use Claude, you can use, you know, GPT models. But Steinberger, with Steinberger inside OpenAI, I, I do think that they're going to be optimized to perform best on GPT models and either company could make the first move. And either way, I think regardless, Anthropic is losing developer influence and I have receipts on that. And this is interesting and this is something that I didn't see really anyone talking about, but you know, former journalist in me spends a lot of time, you know, trying to find facts, stats, statistics and trends. And here's one trend that I saw so about a year ago, back in March of 2025, this is according to OpenRouter. So open router, essentially it makes it easier for developers to use a lot of different API models, right. Without having to, you know, juggle all these different keys. It's essentially just one easy way to integrate and work with a lot of different models. Right? But they've always tracked usage. So what is the highest usage, at least through Open Router on the API side? Right. This obviously doesn't measure, you know, tokens essentially, you know, people who are working directly, you know, with OpenAI, directly with Google. This is just tokens used through OpenRouter, which is the most popular third party API provider. So a year ago, Anthropic had a staggering 40% market share, right? Huge, huge lead. And now for the first time this week, they dropped to less than 10% and they're no longer even in a top three provider. Right. That may change in a couple of weeks, but that is pretty telling to me. Anthropic has always been the developer darling. They've always been the model that developers would, you know, kind of, you know, hook their, you know, hook their horse and buggy onto. They said, hey, Anthropic is the model for us and it doesn't look like that anymore. Right? And I think, like I said, I think this started with the Anthropic, you know, legal notice, I think put a, a taste in a lot of people's mouth, you know, and then, you know, whether it was coincidental or not, I don't think it was. I think it was just the timing, right? Codex, you know, OpenAI released the Codex app, you know, just a few weeks ago they released the, the GPT5.3 Codex model. And you know, between that and some of the Chinese models, you know, Google continues to, you know, ship way more affordable models on the API side and just as capable as an example as, you know, opus 4.6 from anthropic. Anthropic is no longer the big player in development. Right? Like, obviously, you know, this goes to, you know, agentic utes in, you know, traditional software development, but when you just look at, you know, API usage, it used to be anthropic and everyone else was chasing them. It's not the case anymore. And I think that the Claude hype used to be everywhere online. But development developer sentiment I think has completely reversed. So this is obviously a big win for OpenAI and I think it's the latest in just a terrible month, right? Almost full 2026, but I'll say at least a terrible and disastrous month for Anthropic. So let me just recap kind of what's happened here in the last month. First of all, the super bowl ad fiasco. All right, you know, they essentially came out with an ad knocking OpenAI for bringing ads to chat GPT. Right? They were funny, but they were not exactly the most truthful ads, at least how they portrayed, you know, how the ads would be displayed in Chat gbt. Right. But I guess, you know, how many commercials are 100%, you know, true to form. But regardless, according to I Spot data, that ad ranked in the bottom 3% for likability in the last five years. And according to I spot data, only 70. Sorry, only 7% of people even knew what Anthropic Claude was. Right? So not only did no one know who Anthropic was, but no one liked B. It was one of the most unlikable ads over the last five years. So not a good play there. Right? And that's. It was very anti anthropic, if I'm being honest. Anthropic has never been the, you know, the AI company out there, vague posting and, you know, trying to brag, right? They come out with extremely powerful models. They just put a blog post on and they're back at work. So it almost seemed like a, almost like a personality change, right. That started here about a month ago, a couple of weeks ago. And the super bowl commercial, I think left all also a weird taste in a lot of people's mouth and everyone's like, oh, I thought, you know, Anthropic was kind of just this, you know, good AI guy. And here they are, you know, maybe putting out ads that aren't exactly truthful and, you know, kind of puts a weird taste in people's mouth. All right, it's not the end of the bad news, right? So if you listen to the our weekly AI News that matters segment yesterday, you know that Anthropic did not have a good week. So also, the Pentagon is reportedly threatening to label Anthropic a supply chain risk over what they call ethics restrictions which could in theory restrict any government agency from working with Anthropic. So apparently Anthropic is not being quite flexible enough for the Pentagon. So they're kind of fighting with the US government. Not good. They're, you know, trying to pick a fight, maybe unsuccessfully with OpenAI via the super bowl ad. Didn't turn out well. There's a tentative $1.5 billion copyright settlement that was just, that was, just came down. And also their, their research lead resigned publicly and said that the world is in peril. So the sentiment at Anthropic is sinking, which is weird because over the past month, during this same time, I think they've had one of their best months of shipping new products ever. So obviously Claude cowork, the non technical version of Claude code, has continued to get updated. It's really good, right? Their new Claude Opus 4.6 model. Amazing. One of the best in the world. You know, they've been releasing these new plugins that are literally shaking the stock market. They're so good. Yet the sentiment seemingly has shifted away from Anthropic and their Claude models maybe over to not just OpenAI and their new Codex platform, but also to some of the open source models that are becoming just as good. And it seems like Anthropic's image has also really started to change as being this, you know, developer friendly, you know, kind of under the radar cool brand to turning into kind of like a big bully brand, which is, like I said, very not in, you know, kind of their brand guideline of how they've operated for the first couple of years. And then, you know, obviously their CEO, you know, Dario Mati has been kind of, you know, warning people about, you know, hey, AI is going to take, you know, take, you know, maybe up to 50% of white collar jobs, which I think is, you know, I respect that he's being honest about what he think the technology is doing, but you know, when that gets out there and that starts to get a lot of pressure. Then people are starting to look at Anthropic a little bit differently, right? Yes. Sam Altman is out there saying, you know, not too similar things, right? Not out there saying, hey, AI could take half of white collar jobs, right? Maybe he's saying it in a softer, more PR friendly way. But you know, essentially Anthropics had a PR nightmare in a reputation nightmare and it's starting them, it's starting to cause them to lose the lead in the only place that they even chose to compete. So OpenAI's taking it over. I do think with what I'm seeing now, I think on the developer side, I didn't think anyone was going to be able to catch Anthropic maybe until the second part of 2026. But I think OpenAI has already pulled it close and now they have this open source momentum. Not even from openclaw, right? But a lot of people don't understand Codex cli, the command line, command line interface version of codecs is fully open source. They have their open source GPT OSS models and now they have open cloth. So they now all of a sudden have this open source momentum. They are the open source AI company now, right? Which a lot of people, you know, used to, you know, throw jabs at OpenAI saying, oh, you're closed AI. Well, hey, look at the proof is in the pudding now, right? It's like especially with this, you know, open Claw acquisition, you know, Codec cli, technically open source, they're open source models. You know, I think it's completely changed and I think now OpenAI leads in developer goodwill, the agent, ecosystem ownership and now also open source credibility. So a month ago, if I'm being honest, I thought that Claude could potentially catch OpenAI this decade, right? Maybe not in overall users, but I thought a month ago I'm like, hey, maybe, maybe in three years Claude could catch up, right? A lot of their products in, in, you know, between Claude Code, Claude Cowork, some of their plugins were just absolutely on fire, but they kind of low key spit in the face of the group that really made them who they are. So I don't know if I still have that same level of confidence now, right? Between the Open Claw fumble, the super bowl flop, the Pentagon fallout and all these lawsuits, that belief that I had maybe a month ago is kind of gone. And if I'm being honest, I don't think I've really had this kind of about face from AI companies because I followed this stuff very closely. I haven't really had this Since December of 2024, right when OpenAI and Google kind of went toe to toe with some big releases at the end of the year. And at that point I think Google was in a very, very distant second or third and they've been kind of king of the AI hill ever since. So I haven't really had that kind of one month turnaround in terms of how I've viewed a company since December of 2024. So this to me it's pretty shocking, especially as Anthropic's products are getting way better, but their percentage in their usage and the public sentiment is going down. And now I think with Openclaw, OpenAI has the momentum, the developers and the clearest path to not just success for the rest of the year, but I think probably the company, at least between OpenAI and Anthropic that is going to have the more successful IPO going public. All right, I hope this episode was, well, a fun and somewhat opinionated look at the Open Claw acquisition and Anthropics response and kind of disastrous 2026 so far. So if this was helpful, make sure if you haven't already, go to your everydayai.com, sign up for the free daily newsletter and then make sure to go listen to episodes 712 and 7 13. If you like to know kind of these trends, what's happening under the radar, what's you know, what's coming next. That's what shows are for in the 2026 AI prediction and roadmap series. So again, make sure you go listen to episodes 712 and 713. Thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'. All.

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