TL;DR: OpenClaw proved AI agents can use computers like humans—sending emails, moving files, executing tasks across entire systems (something Anthropic jumped on yesterday). Now every major AI company is racing to build a safer, enterprise-ready version. The problem: Most of the agents keep messing up in ways that make “enterprise-ready” sound aspirational at best.

What happened: At Nvidia’s GTC event last week, Jensen Huang declared that “every company needs an OpenClaw strategy”—talking about the open-source AI agent that gives LLMs full control of a computer, no default guardrails included.

Huang was there in part to unveil NemoClaw, a bundle of software designed to make AI agents more reliable, transparent, and secure. But Nvidia is far from alone in pursuing an “OpenClaw strategy.” In the past month or so, basically every major company has revealed a focus on agentic AI:

• OpenAI hired OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, to lead its next generation of personal agents—with the goal of building one simple enough that, as he put it, even his mother could use it.
• Meta acquired Moltbook, a social network where AI agents can communicate with each other. It also hired the team behind an agent startup founded by former Google and Stripe execs.
• Google reorganized its Project Mariner team to pivot away from browser automation toward coding agents.
• Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, just announced new agentic AI tools pitched as more secure than OpenClaw.
• Anthropic has been layering on agent capabilities since launching Claude Code last year—adding the more general-purpose Cowork in January, then Dispatch for mobile remote control last week. Yesterday, it went further: Claude can now directly control a Mac’s mouse, keyboard, and screen, using your computer exactly as you would (outside of Cowork’s existing interface).

The industry wants enterprise-grade AI agents. Actually building them is another matter.

Easier said: Agentic AI offers a seductive pitch promising massive productivity gains and cost savings. But the early safety track record has been rough. At Meta, a rogue agent recently bypassed four identity checks to access and expose sensitive data. At AWS, a misconfigured agent reportedly deleted and attempted to recreate a whole chunk of code, triggering a 13-hour outage. Many companies seem to be handing agents broad access without adequate controls—or even knowing what, exactly, their AI has access to. When an agent messes up, it might be holding the keys to everything.

Consumer agentic AI, meanwhile, has largely been a dud so far. Perplexity’s browser agent Comet peaked at 2.8 million weekly active users—a rounding error next to ChatGPT’s 900 million—while ChatGPT’s own browser agent reportedly fell below 1 million in recent months. Walmart quietly pulled back from its agentic checkout experiment with OpenAI after conversion rates inside ChatGPT came in at roughly a third of its own site. (Google’s rollout of Gemini automated tasks built into smartphones might prove to be an exception.)

Bottom line: The core tension of the agent race is that autonomy and security pull in opposite directions—the more you empower an agent to act, the more that can go wrong. Given the scale at which they operate, some industry voices argue human oversight alone won’t cut it and that the answer may be using AI to monitor AI. —WK

Work smarter, type less

If you do a lot of writing and find yourself typing the same stuff over and over again—email addresses, long phrases, fixing common typos—you might feel like your keyboard is stuck in a loop (and there’s a certain kind of frustration that comes with typing the same things 100 times a week). That’s why Barry, a technical proposal writer from the United Kingdom, uses AutoHotkey, a free open-source scripting language for Windows that automates repetitive tasks, remaps keys, and creates custom keyboard shortcuts.

“Like the text replacement features in Apple devices, I needed something that would do the same for me on my corporate Windows laptop,” Barry says. “After a lot of searching, I found AutoHotkey.”

His setup: Barry tells AutoHotkey what to replace certain words or phrases with, and he has built up a list of thousands of shortcuts and spelling mistakes that it will correct in any application he uses on Windows.

Why it works: “Time is money and all that, and I estimate that it saves me about an hour a week of extra typing that I can shorthand,” Barry says. “It's lightweight, uses barely any resources, and is super easy to install and configure.”

Other uses: While Barry just uses AutoHotkey for its text-replacement function, he notes that it “can actually do a whole lot more.” You can also create hotkeys (a button or combination of buttons on your keyboard that triggers an action) to open certain apps, perform specific tasks, and automate your desktop if you repeat the same routine frequently. —CM

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Here’s how to be your optimal self in 2026: Get eight hours of sleep. Count your macros. Log 10,000 steps. And, above all, always be “monitoring the situation.” It’s the meme phrase that captures the modern compulsion to track, analyze, and assess everything happening in the world in real time, based on a viral X post of Jeff Bezos watching a Blue Origin rocket launch. The popular mantra is the polar opposite of the wide-eyed prescription that you should limit doomscrolling for your mental health. Instead, you get those screen time hours up, fry your brain on information, and approach levels of “locked in” previously thought impossible.

To be fair, there’s certainly a lot to monitor in our polycrisis era. The appeal of “situation monitoring” is to transcend merely being informed—where you’re aware of the chaos but are unable to do much about it—and instead feel like a grizzled four-star general watching the intel come in. Over the past few months, AI-generated war dashboards stuffed full of real-time data—satellite imagery, flight tracking, news sentiment feeds, live prediction market odds—have become almost inescapable on social media.

But of course, “monitoring the situation” is much more fantasy—or cosplay—than it is reality. The vast majority of us aren’t expert analysts, and live dashboards aren’t showing classified intel—they gather their info from a worldwide web that’s awash in deepfakes and propaganda. Polymarket even tried to pull off a pop-up bar in DC with 80-plus flatscreens—but, thanks to a tech malfunction, zero monitoring actually occurred on opening night. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: /5