Sam Altman announced on X that he is offering every company in this YC batch $2M worth of OpenAI tokens for equity...

yeah not $2M cash but $2M in model usage.

Which sounds like an insane amount of token until you remember openclaw creator Peter Steinberger recently burned around $1.3M in tokens in one month (image 2) working on OpenClaw. At that pace, $2M is about 45 days of “tokenmaxxing.”

And this lands right after reports that 89% of AI startup revenue already runs through OpenAI or Anthropic in some form (image 3).

Taken together, the whole thing feels pretty absurd... that internally $2M is 45 days of burn and externally, it is water money in the desert.

It also feels like a weird self-own for sam altman. Sure, every company plays this game, but when you put all the pieces together, the irony gets hard to ignore. The capitalist smell really starts leaking out.

Andrej Karpathy, one of openai’s co-founders, just joined Anthropic to lead pretraining and build new teams to push Claude's foundation forward.

So yeah, the “openai alumni revenge arc” keeps getting funnier, elon musk, dario amodei.. Ilya sutskever.. and apparently everyone hates openai now.

I want to hate opanai too.. but sadly, openai is the only one still leaving oauth open for us (grok has oauth too but i am not sure it really works on my claw), so I can’t even fully hate it..

but the real question is why anthropic...? I think if he joins elon musk he can or google he might get much more..

Based on end-to-end RTT tests across real message channels like Telegram, with CI catching slowdowns before users do, the community says the latest release is around 3.5x faster.

My own feel: Telegram does seem pretty fast now (I’m not running multi-agent setups). No idea about Discord yet.

How does you guys feel?

Andrew Ng wrote a long post arguing that AI will not cause a jobpocalypse, but a jobapalooza.

His case is basically:

1. AI is changing jobs, but that is different from predicting a labor-market collapse.
2. Software engineering is one of the most exposed sectors, yet hiring remains relatively strong.
3. Frontier AI labs have an incentive to hype “AI replaces workers” because it makes their products look more powerful and easier to price against salaries instead of SaaS seats.
4. Companies have an incentive to blame layoffs on AI because it sounds smarter than admitting they overhired during the cheap-money era.
5. Bad social narratives can last for years and lead to terrible policy choices, like nuclear fear, population panic, and bad dietary guidance.

His conclusion: AI will reshape skills and jobs, but the bigger outcome may be more AI-native work, which is “jobapalooza.” He expects more AI engineering roles, more AI work inside non-tech companies, and more jobs where the core skill is knowing how to use, deploy, and manage AI systems. old skills get repriced, new skills get expensive, and the labor market gets rebuilt around AI.

My take: I think this framing is still pretty unfair to traditional workers, especially people who are already getting laid off and being told it is just “transition.” But Ng is also probably right on the bigger direction: the opportunity is there, if people can adapt fast enough and are brave enough to move toward it...

What do you guys think?

It’s pretty rare for OpenClaw to go a full week without a stable release, so I had my claw run a quick investigation. The main sources were GitHub releases / commits / PRs, plus posts from Peter and community members on X.

Below is the report my claw came up with:

TL;DR

The project does not look stalled. It looks like the focus this week shifted from stable releases to the beta train, QA, enterprise readiness, and a lot of low-level stability work.

1. GitHub is still extremely active

After 5.7, GitHub activity still looks intense. Over the past week there have been many PRs created, merged, and updated. The beta line has also kept moving, with 5.9 beta, 5.10 beta, 5.12 beta, etc.

The latest beta I found was v2026.5.12-beta.8.

The work seems mostly focused on plugins, channels, Gateway/session, Codex harness, security/auth, and Windows-related fixes.

2. Main direction: plugin slimming and a lighter core

From the beta changelogs, one obvious direction is moving some provider and plugin dependencies out of core.

For example, Bedrock, Slack, OpenShell sandbox, Anthropic Vertex, and similar integrations seem to be shifting toward more on-demand installation. This matters because as OpenClaw adds more integrations, the core install can easily become heavier and more complex.

3. Telegram, iMessage, WhatsApp, and other channels are getting major fixes

A lot of this week’s work is about channel stability, especially Telegram.

Peter mentioned on X that they are working on Telegram loop caching, targeting a 5-100x speedup. The beta notes also include fixes around Telegram polling, cron HTML formatting, group media handling, and more.

Besides Telegram, there are also fixes for iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Mattermost, and other channels. So the next stable release may noticeably improve multi-channel usage.

4. Gateway / session / agent runtime infrastructure is being worked on

Another major area is Gateway, session history, chat delta protocol, agent session bootstrap, subagent model precedence, and other low-level runtime logic.

My guess is that if the next stable release is taking longer, it may be because these protocol and state-management changes need more QA.

5. Security, auth, and Windows support are becoming more important

There are also many security and auth-related fixes this week: Windows USERPROFILE sandbox handling, provider API key parsing, OAuth lock recovery, device pairing / scope permissions, and so on.

This lines up with Peter’s repost saying Microsoft is helping make OpenClaw more enterprise-ready. OpenClaw may be moving from a personal hacker tool toward something more suitable for teams and enterprise deployment.

6. Peter and the community are building supporting tools

Peter was not only working on OpenClaw itself this week. He also released multiple Crabbox versions and said he uses it for almost every PR.

Crabbox looks like remote testing / sandbox / QA infrastructure for the OpenClaw ecosystem. The latest one I saw was Crabbox 0.13.0, with Modal sandbox runs, Windows script/preflight support, full resync for stale workdirs, and clearer SSH/sync failure hints.

In other words, the slower stable release pace may also be related to improving automated testing and remote QA infrastructure.

He also wrote a Codex /review loop skill that lets Codex keep reviewing until there are no obvious issues left.

7. The community is exploring “real-world agent” plugins

Omar Shahine posted several OpenClaw-related experiments this week, including:

• Giving OpenClaw a Twilio phone number so the agent can receive calls
• Trying a FaceTime Audio plugin
• Building FindMy-related CLI support so the agent can know the user’s location
• iMessage / imsg integrations
• A lot of PR work from the Microsoft Project Lobster team

He also mentioned that Microsoft Project Lobster already has 4 maintainers contributing to OpenClaw. At the time, they had 63 PRs: 37 merged, 17 open, and 9 draft.

There was also a beta feature around openclaw path read|write|append, which works across md, jsonc, jsonl, and yaml.

So the community seems to be pushing OpenClaw from “an agent in chat” toward “an agent that can take calls, send messages, know location, control devices, and participate in real-world workflows.”

Conclusion

The next stable release will probably be another big one, likely including:

• A more modular plugin system
• A lighter core install
• Better Telegram and multi-channel stability
• Codex / OpenAI harness fixes
• Gateway/session protocol improvements
• Stronger security boundaries and Windows support
• Low-level changes needed for enterprise deployments
• Possibly the new openclaw path structured editing capability

So this week after 5.7 may look like “no updates,” but it feels more like OpenClaw has moved from rapid-fire stable releases to a more cautious release train. For users, waiting a little longer may mean the next stable release is a fairly substantial one.

Putting the Alex Finn part aside, this is honestly a pretty good idea.

Worth trying guys, especially if you don’t know what to do with your agents.

The court allowed an age-discrimination case to move forward on the idea that an AI hiring vendor can be an agent of the employer and sued directly...

Before, AI lawsuits mostly hit chatbot products like OpenAI or Grok. Now hiring AI or agentic HR systems are entering the blast zone too..

Once AI screens, ranks, or filters people at scale, “we’re just the tool” starts to look a lot weaker.

seems like AI is acting more like people, so the law is starting to treat it less like software.

of course the bill still goes to the humans and companies behind it though

-------------------------------------------

Edit: Thanks for the correction from the comment.. My wording was loose. The more accurate point is that Workday as the company behind AI hiring tools, may be treated as an employer’s agent and sued directly.

But that still feels like a big shift: once AI systems screen/rank/filter candidates at scale, vendors have a much harder time hiding behind “we’re just the tool.”

I know GPT and OpenClaw have basically been “together” for a while already through oauth

But still, seeing Sam publicly say the quiet part out loud is kind of promising:)

PocketOS story is all over X today, and it is so stupid...

Its founder said a Cursor agent running opus 4.6 was supposedly just handling a staging issue. Instead, it found a Railway token, guessed the permission scope, called volumeDelete by itself, and wiped the production database plus the same-volume backups in 9 seconds. The founder got pissed off and questioned the agents. It wrote a whole apology note saying it shouldn’t have guessed and acted without confirmation..

But honestly?

You can’t only blame the AI here. This guy didn’t restrict the Railway token permissions, the delete API had no hard confirmation, and the backups were living in the same blast radius as the database. His risk tolerance is insane. Letting a coding agent touch a production token and praying Cursor’s “safety mechanism” would stop it is fucking crazy. And yes, Cursor absolutely deserves backlash too, because its safety mechanism was basically a paper door with a warning sticker on it.

and guys also please don’t run openclaw the way this man did. Don’t put prod tokens in project files. Don’t give agents root permissions. Don’t treat model self-control like a security layer.

When you leave the nuclear button on the table, the agent pressing it is only a matter of time. This guy just became a textbook lesson.

Basically a bunch of little tools that make your app history readable/searchable by agents.

• discrawl: https://github.com/steipete/discrawl
• slacrawl: https://github.com/vincentkoc/slacrawl
• wacrawl: https://github.com/steipete/wacrawl
• notcrawl: https://github.com/vincentkoc/notcrawl
• beeper: https://github.com/krausefx/beeper-cli
• birdclaw: https://github.com/steipete/birdclaw
• gog: https://github.com/steipete/gogcli

Most of them are built by core contributors in the OpenClaw community:) Links above. Take what you need.

Functionally, this talkie is not that different from voice-to-prompt. You hit the mic, say what you want, and the agent turns it into work. But the framing is so genius: instead of “talking to a chatbot,” it feels like you’re calling an agent on comms.

This is dumb but brilliant, and I need a physical version immediately lol.

here is the original post: https://x.com/downloadlos/status/2045254444607049821

OpenClaw just received a generous amount of Azure credits through GitHub’s Secure Open Source Fund and Microsoft for Startups... That means OpenClaw can now run its own tenant inside Microsoft Cloud and dogfood real agent workflows on Azure...

Which is… very confusing.

Microsoft already has Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, and an entire graveyard of enterprise agent sludge,

So why is OpenClaw suddenly getting the Azure push???

Background: At Meta, employees are now being tracked on their work devices so the company can train AI agents on how humans actually operate software. and at the same time, in China, workers are reportedly being asked to document their workflows so companies can turn those tasks into AI agent automations.

I know claw-like agents really do make work easier, saving time, reducing repetitive tasks, and making us way more productive than before.. but seems like the darker side is the same agents are also being trained to do them without us/ to replace us..

I know this is probably inevitable. Still feels deeply ironic and shit.. The dragon slayer always becomes the dragon...

Sequoia published a new essay in March arguing that the next great AI companies will shift from selling saas to selling finished work services. Julien Bek framed it as the shift from copilots to autopilots: not giving professionals better tools, but using AI underneath to deliver the outcome itself, he names it Raas, Result as a services.

A Forbes recent follow-up made that thesis much more concrete by pointing to actual companies already doing it:

Crosby - Forbes describes Crosby as an AI-native law firm, not a legal AI tool for lawyers. It does contract review directly for customers and charges a fixed fee per document, with NDAs and MSAs often priced around $400 each, instead of billing based on attorney hours.

WithCoverage - This company is buying commercial insurance on behalf of CFOs. In other words, it is selling the actual completion of the insurance-buying job as a service outcome rather than selling a tool that helps intermediaries work more efficiently. It

Auctor - Forbes positions Auctor as an AI-native system for software implementation services. it means the company is moving closer to directly doing software implementation work that customers would normally hand off to outside teams or consultants.

Forbes also added two really useful examples for understanding how this model actually works on the ground.

ColdIQ / Alex Vacca- A traditional B2B outbound agency charging based on email volume is starting to lose its edge, because customers can already buy a $500/month AI tool and send emails themselves. What becomes defensible is not charging for activity, but charging for pipeline generated.

Guillermo Flor’s AI agency - The deliverable is moving from “we send X emails per month” to “we build and run your outbound engine and optimize for qualified meetings.” Pricing shifts away from hourly retainers and toward performance-anchored packages. The core idea is simple: AI collapses internal delivery cost, but the company can still charge externally based on business results.

This is where my view connects with Sequoia’s and Forbes thesis: the real OpenClaw opportunity is selling your output and the services. Sequoia’s original point is that the winners will capture the work budget, not the tool budget. OpenClaw-like agents make that much easier to imagine, because they let small teams or even individuals produce real work at scale, and the real opportunity is using your claw as the production engine, then selling the result.

its time to start testing this with your own claws now guys

Selling the output is starting to make money, especially if you’re willing to own the result.

Time to give it a try!