Microsoft said it has reaffirmed the potential of OpenClaw, a tool the company once dismissed as a "virus," and will actively leverage it.
Omar Shaheen, Corporate Vice President (CVP) at Microsoft, said at a media briefing on the company's Mountain View, California campus on Thursday that "Project Lobster" will serve as a key pillar in the artificial intelligence market. Project Lobster is an initiative to embed functions similar to OpenClaw, an open-source autonomous AI agent platform, into M365, Microsoft's enterprise subscription service.
"Through an open-source project that harnesses unlimited AI capabilities and unlimited tokens, AI can do more than 10 times the work of humans," Shaheen stressed.
OpenClaw, created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, gained explosive popularity after being released in January on GitHub, a code-sharing website for developers. Inspired by the fact that OpenClaw's logo is a lobster, "raising lobsters" became a trend in China. The platform was praised for allowing even non-developers to easily build agents that run 24 hours a day on PCs. However, weak security was cited as a limitation, to the extent that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella likened OpenClaw to a "virus" in February.
But Shaheen, who saw OpenClaw's potential, built a lobster on Feb. 6 and shared it on social networking services (SNS). About three weeks later, he showed an internal AI investment group how the lobster had handled email sorting, package tracking, schedule management, and smart home control over those three weeks. A month after that, the company decided to put him in charge of the OpenClaw development organization. Microsoft's "virus" verdict was completely overturned in just two months.
"It can be easily installed from GitHub and integrates with multiple messengers such as WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack, and Teams, which is why many people could use it," Shaheen explained. "Honestly, at first I didn't find it interesting, but after about 60 days, a sufficient ecosystem had formed." His assessment is that security issues can be addressed by leveraging Microsoft software.
Still, he emphasized that Microsoft's own AI model Copilot and its in-house chip Maia remain necessary. Open-source projects like OpenClaw are advantageous for expanding new services, he said, but proprietary models and chips are needed to support the server and power costs that arise when Microsoft brings these in and runs them for general users.
