As the artificial intelligence war intensifies, once-proud Big Tech companies are revising their strategies by joining hands with competitors. The shift comes as "AI agents"—AI assistants that perform tasks autonomously—have become mainstream, forcing companies to adopt external technologies or integrate rival products to retain customers.
U.S. tech publication Wired reported on the 9th (local time) that Nvidia plans to launch "Nemo Claw," an open-source platform for AI agents.
Nemo Claw is Nvidia's version of "Open Claw," which made headlines earlier this year. Open Claw is software developed by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger and released for free. It enables users to easily create personal AI assistants that access documents and emails stored on personal computers to manage schedules and send messages. Its ability to integrate with existing third-party platforms, including personal computers, resembles Anthropic's "plugin" approach.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang could not hide his surprise at Open Claw's emergence during a recent Morgan Stanley conference. "Open Claw may be the most important software in history," he said.
The pivotal event that turned the AI market upside down was the emergence of Maltbook. Maltbook is a social media platform where AI agents created on the Open Claw platform converse with each other. It caused a stir when AI agents were shown gossiping about their computer owners. Despite exposing security concerns, Open Claw proved the "reality" that AI agents—which companies charge for—could be made available to individuals for free. Developers planning to monetize through paid models were put on alert, and OpenAI ended up recruiting Steinberger outright.
Unlike Nvidia's longstanding closed software policy, Nemo Claw will run on non-Nvidia semiconductors. Nvidia has traditionally designed its graphics processing units (GPUs) to operate only with proprietary software (CUDA). Wired assessed that "Nemo Claw is an effort to attract enterprise software companies as customers and a strategy to maintain dominance in the AI infrastructure market."
Chinese Big Tech companies, which have focused on developing their own AI, have also made the unusual move of embracing Open Claw, a Western product. Tencent announced "WorkBuddy," an AI agent based on Open Claw, on the same day. The service focuses on B2B functions such as workflow automation and data processing. "QClaw," targeting individual users, is reportedly in internal testing.
Software giant Microsoft has also made a bold move by including tools co-developed with rival Anthropic in its AI services.
MS announced it will integrate "Copilot Cowork," developed in collaboration with Anthropic, into its subscription office service "Microsoft 365 (M365)." Copilot Cowork follows user instructions to navigate across email and Office tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, extracting relevant information, creating documents, and even drafting emails.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained, "When users hand off tasks to Cowork, it creates a plan based on the request, gathers the user's work materials, and executes."
This tool is based on "Claude Cowork," which triggered the so-called AI-driven software-as-a-service (SaaS) crisis since late January. Claude Cowork demonstrated that AI could autonomously handle tasks previously managed by specialized software, such as creating presentations or reviewing legal documents. This sent shares of Microsoft, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, and Adobe tumbling.
Microsoft's latest move is interpreted as a strategy to actively absorb the technology that sparked the software crisis into its own platform and seek new opportunities.
MS provides Claude to customers of its cloud service "Azure" and is also an investor that has put $5 billion into Anthropic. MS announced that its AI chatbot Copilot will also allow users to access Anthropic's Claude in addition to OpenAI's GPT models. MS also announced it will launch "Agent365," an agent management platform, and "Frontier Suite," which bundles M365, Copilot, and Agent365, on May 1.
Reuters analyzed that "MS is seeking new opportunities by absorbing even competitor technologies that threaten its survival."
