Welcome. Welcome. We're about to get started in just a few minutes. If everyone can grab some seats, make your way to the front. We'll get started in just a minute. Thank you.
Good. I know. I'm going to be like 2 minutes.
What's that?
Thank you. Thank you. Amazing.
Folks can come grab some seats, please.
Can we turn up volume a little bit?
All right, thank you all for joining us tonight. Welcome to OpenClaw after hours at GitHub during Microsoft Build. If you guys could quiet down just for a second. Thank you. Thank you for joining us all. We're super excited to have the community here to join us during this event to celebrate some of the cool work that's being done with the OpenClaw community. I'm going to kick it off and hand it over to PJ Mets who's going to be our MC for the night. Welcome PJ, please.
Holy smokes. Hello everybody. How are we doing? Okay. Well, look, look, I know this is going to feel like a high school motivational speaker, but I know we can do better than that. So, one more time, how are we doing? Holy smokes. This is a fantastic room to be looking at. Look at all these people. I can't believe we're doing this event here tonight. I wore my bestest red hat for it. We turned on our red lights for you. Obviously, there's a theme going on, right? So, I'm here just to talk about GitHub and for a brief second. My name is PJ Mets. I'm a developer advocate on the education team. I work with students and teachers all over the world making sure they know how to use GitHub. This is an event that like 8 months ago we had no idea we'd be at, which is kind of cool. And to be honest, like I didn't think I was going to be here till about an hour ago. So, I'm super stoked to be here with you all tonight. So, what I need to do is I need to ask you all some questions as my watch alarm goes off. So, I've got some special swag here. It's playing cards. So, who here likes to gamble? It's 2026. Everyone's gambling. So, what I'm going to do is I need to figure out like what some of the best claw names are out there. So, who's got a really good name for their claw and wants to share with every Oh, your hand was up immediately. Look at this. All right. What's the name of your claw?
Why? Like Batman's assistant and also like the app that like is like an assistant. So yeah, we get one Batman reference. That's solid. Does anyone else have a superhero themed one here? What's your name? What's your claw's name?
It's called Clawax.ai. Open claw to the max.
Oh, I was like, you have to say the whole thing. Like it's a long name. All right, you're getting some cards for sure. Longest name in the world. All right, hit it. My claw's name is crabme.
Crabme. Like crab memory.
That's pretty good. Crab. But it's supposed to be a lobster, right?
Yeah. Lobsters, crabs, it's all the same thing. I got to get up here. I'm sorry. I got to actually talk to some people up here. I hope this microphone doesn't feed back. We're going to learn today. All right. What's your claw's name?
Claw maxing. Of course it is. Naturally. Naturally. You got one shouting. Mine's Virgil as in Dante's guide through hell.
Mine's Virgil as in Dante's guide through hell.
Hold on. That was really good. Virgil, like Dante's guide through hell. Fantastic. If I ever go to hell, I hope I have a guide. It'll be difficult otherwise. Okay, I got one more, but hold on. Like, this one's got to be really good. So, think about your claw name. Is it really good? You're standing up. You've got a shirt on, too. So, all right, let's do this. Your claw name is Paulie because of the San Francisco parrots. So it's parrot like Paulie. So we call it I love that. Yeah. There's these parrots here in San Francisco. Enjoy your cards. There's these parrots here that fly around. They're so pretty. That's a great name. This solid. So I'm stoked to be in front of y'all. Little personal information about me. My wife's nickname is lobster. And it's not because of Open Claw. But now that all of tech is obsessed with lobsters, I see this stuff everywhere. So I'm like, here's a pin. Here's a sticker. She's like, 'Where are you getting this from?' I'm like, 'Don't worry about it. There's cool stuff happening in the tech world.' So, we're super excited to have you all here. This GitHub space, this is called the, by the way, get together space. You're welcome. We're super excited to have you at this building at HQ and to see all of these community people coming together on something that again did not exist eight months ago. And yet here we all are connecting with each other and doing amazing stuff and doing amazing work on brand new cutting edge technology. So what I want to do is I want to bring up our first person and our first person is a very important person to talk to you all. This is going to be Kyle Dagel coming up to talk to you all about GitHub. So Kyle, please come on up and start us off please.
Thanks PJ. How's everybody doing? Yeah, you can feel I don't know for those of you that have been at build the past two days, you might be in a metered level of energy after expending a lot of energy the past. So, I don't know how PJ does it, but I'll just say yeah, welcome to GitHub HQ. It's so good to have you all here. This whole first floor space is meant for this. We do get togethers, but our teams are remote and so the reality is we're all actually just looking at a video call. We're just bringing community in here four days a week roughly. So I'd love just everyone to give an enormous round of applause to Janice and the office team for putting this together. All the fun treats and snacks and just making any of this possible. It's a huge labor of love for her. My claw is named Baxter. I don't have a good story for that but I thought it would be you know just an easy name to keep referencing and my team affectionately now talks about Baxter in Slack because there's many times where I'm preparing for things or going through my personal notes I say I'm waiting on Baxter and the team kind of laughs and says okay well what did Baxter say and I paste things back. I'm personally very excited about like the execution container environment so we can get either the claw into my work computer because right now it is sitting on the Mac Mini that I bought like everyone else while I was on a work trip and it plugged into my hotel room and then ultimately I brought it home. I think that experience having been at GitHub for 13 years now myself is like something we've all had that moment of the moment where it finally all clicks and the magic happens you know for you personally and at GitHub we've always known that's done by people that's done by maintainers someone had to sit down and figure it out put it together and whether that be us you know just providing the platform or us responding to Peter the team every time a new API rate limit gets hit and we desperately try to figure out how to cobble together a bigger limit to support the many many claws running. That's just what we're looking to do just to support the maintainers in the community to come together build something magical. And look, I mean you all are the lucky few that got in. I believe there's 1,700 people waiting to get the magic email. 2,000 3,000. I mean the number grew precipitously in the last 48 hours. So, it's so good to have you here. I won't waste any more time. I'd love to introduce Omar, Dave, and Peter to come on up and chat about OpenClaw.
Hello everybody, welcome. My name is Omar Shaheen. I'm a corporate vice president at Microsoft on Microsoft Scout which we announced yesterday at Build and is our open claw powered work assistant which I'm super excited to bring to market. I'm very pleased to introduce Peter and Dave. Thanks for being here. And I have 34% battery life to ask you all these questions. All right. Yeah. So, first things I want to share a little story. So, I crossed paths with these two in kind of interesting ways. I was a customer of Peter back in 2012 when we licensed PSP PDF kit at Microsoft to power our PDF rendering for OneDrive mobile apps and I was like super impressed like he's just a builder amazing engineer and so when he popped up and OpenClaw popped up I was like I'm going to go check that out. And then Dave built amazing things. Path was a social network that was super awesome. My wife and I used it back in the day to sort of share pictures with each other. And then Facebook Connect which many of you may know is like one of the most explosive developer platforms ever built. So it's like to have this opportunity to be here, spend time with these people in these new roles is like it's a privilege for me and I'm just I'm excited to get started. So, going to get started with some questions. Peter, you've done a lot of podcasts and I've listened to every single one. So this is going to be a 400 level question.
You listen to all three and a half hours of them.
You have to really challenge him. Come on. All right. Let's start with a question I'm super curious about. How did the two of you get connected?
Oh, that's a great story. You know, I did not expect that OpenClaw would create all of this. And that's honestly like the thing I'm mostly proud of. Like having a little bit of this old builder energy back that was kind of like there 20 years ago where people were excited about the internet and then suddenly it almost feels like the '90s to a degree where people are excited again about like building something on themselves and like owning this thing and like buying their own hardware and tinkering with it. And that's really what I wanted to achieve as a project like you own this thing you hack on this thing. Remember reminder for the first two months the only way to install openclaw was like get clone pmppm build and then gateway run that that was the installation way and it got me a lot of PRs. And basically overnight everything exploded. My phone number leaked online. Like people were calling me. Yeah. Some of these reporters figured out if you just call someone often enough, the iPhone thinks there is an emergency and will still ring even if you're in sleep mode. I did not know that. My Twitter DMs like you'd scroll down but at some point it just like it just like bugs out. I think I still haven't read all the DMs but luckily Dave was in my DMs as well and like what the [__] this guy? But he seemed like interesting and he was like trying to push me to do something I didn't want to do. But then we had a call for me it was in the middle of the night. I don't know for sure evening for you and I kind of we heard like a thing. Yeah. I mean he's married but I could feel like he was claw killed. And we just kept in touch and I guess the stars aligned. I felt that he's a good one and he helped me a lot with oh my god all the legal stuff on the foundation. I like if you think like making a company is hard, try to make a nonprofit. That's like company in hard mode.
Like everything is more complicated. Just getting a bank account, especially as an alien of extraordinary ability, is everything's very challenging. But it was important to like get the structure right. So even if I sell my time to someone else like the project stays independent. And we actually we got some nice donations. We could hire people. Things are going in very exciting ways. I actually get some sleep again.
Yeah. That's a quick story. And Dave, why did you reach out to Peter?
You know, when I was 7 years old, my grandfather put a Macintosh Plus on my desk and I fell in love with this idea of the computer and I started building things with HyperCard and Apple Script and you know just like it was this feeling that I could create anything. And then I went on and you know you've talked about it like I got to work at these cool places. I worked at Apple, I worked at Facebook, I built this developer platform, and then I built Path. And all along the way, there's always been this kind of chasing this feeling of being able to create something myself. And I don't know, like Peter was saying, for like the last 10 years, the valleys kind of felt like the builder energy was sort of lost in crypto and I don't know, SaaS and like these things that like business became the conversation that was happening in all these buildings around town. And a friend of mine, an old hacker friend from the '90s, reached out to me when I was at home over the holidays. I was in Montana. I grew up in Montana. And he was like, you should install this Cloudbot thing. And I was,
Careful, the D is silent.
I know. And I was like, I don't have time, you know, I'm busy with my family, like trying to take some time off. But I decided to install it the next day. And within 24 hours, I was just like, that feeling that I had when I was seven was back. And I was just like, I have to meet the creator of this. Like this, not only does this have to be protected, but we have to get this to everybody in the world. And I started just making more things with it than I've made in a really long time. Not because I didn't want to, but I think there was something about the speed at which you can do things now that it keeps up with your creativity. And for whatever reason, it fit my brain. And so I reached out to Peter and I just said, I love this and we have to protect it and make sure the community you know is protected over the long term. And so that's kind of been the conversation ever since. And we've ended up in a bunch of strange countries together now everywhere from Tokyo to, you know, all over the world. So it's been really amazing. And like you said the you know when I was building Facebook platform we had an enormous explosion of developer activity. It took us a year to reach a million users million developers. I think that happened this time like in 2 weeks. So, we've been kind of trying to keep up with it and it's been an enormous amount of work and a lot of phone calls between Peter and I where he was asking to sleep more and I'm like, we're trying, you know, we've been trying to just make things happen and like you said, like doing this nonprofit is been entrepreneurship on expert mode. So, we've been doing our best and we've made a lot of progress. So, excited to talk to you all about it.
I love that story and HyperCard was awesome. All right, so Dave, this question is for you. When you look at OpenClaw like as an investor ecosystem builder what you know what told you that this was more important than just a developer tool like sort of you spoke a little bit about that builder energy you felt and going back but like when you think about like the whole world like how do you get the whole world to pay attention to something that's as powerful and magical as open claw
I mean I think one of the first times that night Peter called me and we were talking there was a bunch of really intense stuff going on. He had a lot of people coming at him and I remember saying to him, I think you found Linux of AI. And I really sort of felt that way in that you know, we've been we'd all experienced these other AI systems, right? We've been using chatbt, been using claude or whatever, and none of them really felt like something that you could build on top of that you could take not just and customize, you know, a little sort of thin shim on top, but that you could actually take the entire thing and build something substantial on top of it. And not only could you do that with this, there were a lot of core components that you could tinker around with like that Peter I think so thoughtfully designed, but you could also think very broadly about what you could build with this thing. And so I was just like there's nothing else like this. Like I sit there and I receive a lot of pitches. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. I've invested in over a thousand companies over the last 20 years. I've seen a lot of different things built a lot of different ways and there was just nothing in AI. There was a lot of like let's build a vertical version of this thing on top of the model. But then the models would like eat that entire category of startup. And so everybody in the investor community was like how do we even invest in applications on top of this? And so open cloud was the first time where I was like I think I can see 10 years of and beyond of entire companies, entire people's lives dedicated to building things on top of this and that maybe we are kind of in 1997 and the web was just invented and agents are kind of like websites and we've got the framework now. And that's where our conversation really accelerated because we were like, if we can make this like the platform that people can go build agents on top of for a million or billions of different reasons, then that could be very powerful. And so that's been the ongoing conversation. And I guess that's the long answer to your question.
Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. All right, Peter. I want to ask you about scale. So open clause had a huge amount of demand in a super short time. Like what have the last few weeks taught you about scale? Specifically also about community and expectations.
That's a good question. I mean I mean scale is I feel the biggest issue on scale is still people like and attention. You can automate so many things but you cannot really automate taste or thoughtful design. And then the other thing is you can add more people to the project but it doesn't automatically mean things go faster. I mean, it's like a lesson that we hear so many times, but still humbly I'm reminded about it every time I try. And then again like the meta level of open claw I also find so incredibly interesting because we're hitting so many issues like Kyle mentioned it before like I have a Slack channel now to like the GitHub folks where I can ask them to like press the button and pressing the button means resetting my rate limits and I think at some point one of the team like automated with a claw and got in big trouble. So the whole way of like how we build open claw all the little things we build to automate and to help test it. That's really the unlock for more scale. Like now I can my coding sessions went I guess from 10 to like 56 when the models got faster. Now they're kind of like at 30 again because I found ways to like close the loop even further and like to end to end test everything and like also have auto review and then everything takes forever. My trust in what I build is so much higher that my attention span usually I only need it one time when I discuss what I need and then even the end to end verification is done by the system so I scale better but I still I'm still human that's a problem.
Yeah. Awesome. So I'm actually quite curious about the foundation. And I wanted to ask like how you see the role of the foundation. And what can the foundation do for OpenClaw?
Yeah, I mean we set up the foundation I mean when we were first talking about it it was very clear that this is an open source project and so we need to do this nonprofit and the goal of a nonprofit at the end of the day at least in the United States is to serve the public good. And so what is the public good? The public good is the maintenance and continued engineering of the openclaw project, right? And Peter and I have also talked a lot about that there's this secondary thing that might even be a higher level mission than the actual project itself, which is that if you look at the research out in the market right now, AI is currently less popular. Not it's more it's less popular than ICE and Jeffrey Epstein in the United States which this is a serious problem right and what's the most amazing thing about openclaw I mean look at everybody that's here right now we've seen like we said people in every all kinds of countries we have different stuff going on all over the world and everyone's showing up because it's fun because it's a little bit weird because we've kind of brought this builder energy back to things. And we're bringing people closer to AI by showing them that they can not just interact with it and talk with it 10 times a day that can build anything that they want. They can build a business. They can build they can make beer. They can, you know, do all kinds of interesting things. And so the foundation can also play a role in trying to change the narrative and to help people get closer to AI. And I think that's something that really I think bonds Peter and I quite a bit and is something we're trying to put into the foundation. And then you know of course the foundation can also provide a livelihood and so we're super excited. We're going to talk about a little bit more in the next couple of weeks but we've got several people on board full-time now. We've got an amazing set of people involved that has been largely due to that we've brought in some very large donations or actually we have to call them sponsorships. And I've been able to bring you know my world I spend a lot of time in the world of capital and putting together resources to build projects. And so I've been able to bring together a lot of different types of people. We've had the University of Michigan show up. I know there's a lot of go blue people out in around the valley, but the University of Michigan gave us an enormous donation. They also started a institute for agentic engineering that'll start teaching classes this fall. We have Mount Cyani about to come on board as a sponsor and they want to see scientific discovery for neurological diseases and so we're receiving a lot of really interesting conversations that are beyond just the usual suspects. And so I think that that says something about what we're trying to accomplish. I don't know what else you would add, Peter.
I would make the language stronger that it's not maybe, it's a definitely. Also realizing that we only finalized this structure a few weeks ago. So I'm very excited in the future to like do more events. Not just like also full day hackathons where like we bring people together that build stuff on top of open or any other agents like who cares in the end it's about getting people together that are excited about what we can build with the technology that's already out there. That's like my thesis almost. We don't need better models. Like the main limiting factor right now is imagination. Because even if the models would not get any better, we could change the world for the next 5 to 10 years easily just by cleverly applying and building things with the tech and the intelligence already out there.
That's awesome. And you're right, like not seeing the usual suspects is kind of also an interesting angle to like who's paying attention. This is not the normal sort of folks that are investing in, you know, capabilities like this. So going back to the imagination point you know one of the things one of the privileges I have I think is like waking up in the morning firing up Discord going to the main standard channel and seeing like what happened in the last 7 hours and you know you are usually fixing things and then inventing new things all at once. What are you most excited about? Maybe something that you like want to implement but haven't had time yet. Like what's the thing that you are scratching up against?
Ah, so many things like the I'm still like now finally we have really good people on board. I can give them more stuff. So I feel slowly I get my time and attention back and actually trying out more things as I did in the very beginning and then the flood of people came and like all the issues came and I drowned for a while. There's multiple things that really excite me. I think the current way we do memory is not great. It works. It's surprisingly effective for how simple it is, but I have some ideas. This could be a lot better. Also right now the agent does regular tool calls but the whole world is moving towards code mode and we already have experimental code mode including interesting ways how to like convert MCPs to just be a library and like maybe even make it so that the agent can like grab API calls. I already added some stuff. It's not on by default. The evolves I did so far were like showed that things get significantly faster. And again, it's like yes, we're getting better models, but we are still so early. There's so much we can still improve on the harness. Like I see open to a little bit like a Factorio game is infinite levels and like I go in Discord and there's memory and I'm at maybe at level three, but I definitely want to go to level five very soon. And then there's like the core loop and then there's like community and it's like this is like infinite areas and infinite levels.
Are you still playing Factorio?
Again like my open claw is my Factorio right now.
That's what I thought. I thought you'd say that I started playing last year and then cloud code showed up. I was like no time for that. Okay I have a funny story to tell. So one of the things about the open clock maintainer community was like I showed up on one day and I was like, 'What am I supposed to do?' And somebody said, 'It's high agency, man.' I was like, 'Okay, I know what that means.'
We keep saying that to people and it works sometimes.
Yeah. I was like, 'Okay, high agency.' Like that means don't f up. Like be thoughtful, you know? Go read. Ask your agent to like crawl through the last 20 days of stuff and tell you like how things work. But I started working on this iMessage thing and like Peter's built like 75 other things that are like part of the ecosystem and I like got all this stuff working and then there was this bug in Peter's like GitHub action thing that he had to do. So I sent him a text message. I was like Peter I found a bug and he sends me a screenshot that's like hey Clanker Omar found the bug fix it. And I was like oh this is so cool. So was that is this like a silly one-off story or is that a glimpse of like how software development is changing?
I think it's more a glimpse of the more data you connect to your agent and then you give them little skills to like help them along the way, the more you can automate in the pipeline, right? And my pipeline now is like over something. Look at this here's the PR with the fix and I verified it end to end on a VM. So it's no longer works on my machine. So you need to like make this longer like I shouldn't even be able to I shouldn't even do this. There should be a hook where like my claw automatically gets a ping and then decides is this something I could prepare. I mean also token matching but I feel we're still not at the end. And like even here, why does it need to end at the PR? It could just build me a branch release that I could already test and if I like it, I just like to do the Caesar. Yes. And it's the new version. Like it's all about like your imagination. How much can you automate? And it's a step function. Every little thing I build improves my workflow a little bit. And these things compound. Even if they sometimes start a silly experiments or have silly names, some of them may be silly, some of them become incredibly valuable.
Yeah. And I think one of the things that people don't quite understand is that you and the team are not just building OpenClaw. you're building this whole ecosystem of capabilities for safely moving at the speed I think we all want to move at because it's just like the velocity is just so profoundly like amazing. I mean to jump in there like there were definitely some bumps along the road. I don't know if you've seen the Apo releases where we at some point realized we reimplemented the shitty version of NPM. So it's like part of what's so attracting attractive for open code to me is about this. Okay, let's forget everything how we build software. Let's try a new way and then yeah, some things don't work and then like we learn from the mistakes, but damn, we're like we're getting very close to the dark factory now. Totally agree. So I'm going to ask one last question. I mean maybe similar to Dave I think we started our careers maybe around the same time but like I remember web 1.0 and I remember being here in the valley actually during the dot com bust and then web 2 and then like broadband like I remember going to work which is where the fast internet was and then home is where the slow internet like there were all of these like very clear moments along this like 25 year arc of my tech career. mobile cloud. I remember when YouTube came out and people were like that's never going to work. So I sort of can't help but think back to like all of this transformations that occurred. People are like what are these calls like and it's like it's hard to describe until you experience it yourself and you have that moment where you're like you talk about the WhatsApp moment. I had my moments. You probably had your moments. So do you think this point in time is fundamentally different than some of these other changes? I mean I would say my perspective is there's this builder role which is very different about this moment than maybe all the previous ones that have come across the last 25 years. What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I think that it's exciting because I think in the 2010s we went into this like grind core culture where it was like I'm going to grind in a building in San Francisco and like get my money and it was just like not about building and tinkering and the whole thing Peter just said like this sort of the fun of tinkering I think happens when the aperture widens when people are like so enchanted by a new technology that they can't sleep, you know, and I think we're back to that. Like I definitely felt that way during the internet era, right? Like there was this time where everyone would go to these meetups because you were just all trying to make sense of what's going on. Like what? There's so much opportunity. I don't know what to do with it all. I need to bounce off some people in order to have better ideas. And so I think we're just back to a cycle of that. And I do think the tools are really fun. Like these are amazing tools. Like they're the most fun tools. I think that's why we're all so excited. It's like we've all been kind of talking to computers using this esoteric language or series of languages for a long time. And like only 50 million people in the whole world of the 6 billion people that use the internet have been able to speak that language. And now all of a sudden you can speak English and anyone can make things. And so part of it is I keep telling Peter this that every day I get into the main maintainers channel or I'm like working on something and I constantly tell Peter I'm like are we as out on the frontier as I think we are? And I hope we can teach people some of the stuff that we're learning. I think we actually have a kind of a almost a responsibility to do that because we're out there like, you know, now it's not going to where the fast internet is. It's like I go to the maintainers channel because that's where the really awesome access to token is, you know, and we're doing a lot of really interesting things and it's so much fun and these tools are amazing and people talk about in a lot of different ways, but I just think we're back to a creative period and that's really exciting. I think maybe the thing to really say to people is that it's not over. Just because the first batch of AI companies is going public doesn't mean that this all is over now. Like I actually think the era of agents is going to be like as big as the era of apps on top of the iPhone or on top of the internet, right? Like it's going to be that big. And it was like way bigger than the late '90s, right? So I think there's a huge amount of opportunity that we can all go explore together.
Yeah, I love that. I think that your point about creativity is like the most important thing that like we get to spend our creative energy building and it's more accessible technology. So I just want to thank Dave and Peter for being here. Thanks for having me. And thank you again to the GitHub folks. Like before January, I think I had like two GitHub repos and I have 70 now. So, and there's a lot of people like me out there. So, like I love that GitHub's a big part of this story as well. And so with that, we're going to wrap up and transition.
Yeah. What I'd love to do actually, I mean, as you said, Peter, the whole thing is a community behind OpenClaw. And so what I thought would be cool would be to get some of the maintainers up, the people that are here. We've also got a lot of the maintainers watching online on the channel right now. So, I thought we could get everybody up who's in the maintainer channel and get a photo together and then that way the people who all have claws can have a little say thank you to the maintainers.
Everybody, so we're going to have a little photo.
Come on through. That's all the maintainers. Scott, he's coming now. Any more? There is more. Do you want to ones that are? Yeah, exactly. The folks online here as well. We're going to say thank you to them as well. Yeah.
So, everybody, if you'd like to give them a big round of applause.
And then we've actually commissioned a very small token of our appreciation.
So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the free token. Not tokens, I'm afraid, but this is it's a small token.
So, if I get a sec. So it's officially the fastest growing open source project of all time to OPEN
Big round everybody. Thank you to the maintainers.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. Thank you.
All right. Hopefully you can hear me. That's cool. All right. If you'll take a step off.
Thank you so much. You're very welcome. For a long time, I wasn't sure like I never had public confirmation. Exactly. Sorry. Thanks all.
All right. Hi everyone. I'm Ashley. Just take a quick moment to introduce our next speaker. Speaking of open-source AI and now security, I'd like to introduce the CEO of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zlin.
All right, I'll go be very brief. First of all, I want to thank Peter in particular for saying how difficult and even more difficult than a regular company it is to start a nonprofit. You know, 22 years ago, I met my wife who's a Harvard Business School graduate, tech exec, blind date, saw her, she asked me what I do for a living. I'm like, I work at this open-source nonprofit and we give everything away. The look of disappointment, it's like palpable. But today the Linux Foundation's home to Kubernetes, PyTorch, MCP, you know, all of the technology that's used to build all of
This super cool stuff. And the good news is that, you know, we sort of have won in the sense that the entire AI stack essentially above those GPUs is open source. You know, Kubernetes, VLM, like think about it, everything all the way up to the agentic layer, OpenClaw. It's great. The bad news is the technology that is changing all of our lives that is making things like OpenClaw possible is causing us to look back at all this stuff and realize that it used to be an adversary that wanted to find a vulnerability and exploit it to attack somebody had to have a bunch of time, a bunch of skill, and a bunch of money. And AI has compressed that all into minutes and hours. And what is happening is 30 years of open-source technical debt. How many people here are maintainers? I know the OpenClaw folks. Who else are maintainers here? How many of you have foregone test coverage in order to create a new feature? Do you always fuzz your code? Are you always threat modeling? These are the least popular O'Reilly books, you know, like [laughter]. And the bill for this 30 years of all of these, you know, sort of technical debt will get around to security has now come due because these attackers now have a tool that they can use to exploit that technical debt. And so the question is what are we going to do about it? And the way that we need to think about it is answer three questions. What is the world's most important open source software package version number in rank order? We figure there's about 700,000 if you think about starting with Linux, obviously OpenClaw, and then all the longtail dependencies out than any normal enterprise would count on. It's about 750,000 projects. That means there are more than 750,000 maintainers like the folks here who are struggling to keep up with what they're doing right now that now have all these folks who are powered by AI tools, things like Mythos, the Linux Foundation's a part of it, other tools who are in goodnatured way finding vulnerabilities, submitting to the maintainer and the maintainers' heads are exploding. And so what do we do for these maintainers, right? Hey, what do we do for the XZ utils kind of attacks where, you know, you didn't exploit the maintainer's software weakness, you exploited his loneliness and vulnerability. People don't just need a helping hand by giving them intelligence. They need a companion. That's what these maintainers need. And that's what at the Linux Foundation we're working with and what you saw last week with IBM, how many people saw the Lightwell announcement? $5 billion and 20,000 engineers that IBM is contributing to open-source projects to go look at that footprint of technical debt and help pair up a maintainer with an engineer, maybe stop working on a feature at IBM and go fix some of the dependencies that they use in their products. The good news is if we can get this intelligence into the hands of maintainers and we can collectively have the willpower to work together like we do great in open source to give the maintainers at least a short-term companion to retire a bunch of this technical debt using AI tools. We can get ahead of these adversaries and that's what the Linux Foundation is really going to be committed to. But it is a huge endeavor. And so if you are out there working as a maintainer and need help, let us know. If you're a company that took a dependency on an open-source project and you're trying to push something upstream and you're complaining that, you know, no maintainer is responding, the burden of maintenance is not on the maintainer who may not even be around anymore. It's on you. It's time to pitch in everybody. And so that's what we're thinking about at the Linux Foundation. That is what we need to do about AI. And I think it's a pretty daunting challenge. Good news is we won. Bad news is we also won. And as they like to say in my favorite movie, sometimes you eat the bear. We did with open source. But sometimes the bear eats you. Let's stop that from happening and all work together on open source security and AI. Thank you.
Thank you, Jim. [applause] All right. Thank you very much, Jim. All right. Next up, we'll have to rearrange some chairs here. We're going to have a panel with some of the maintainers that you saw earlier on stage. I'll invite them to join me up on stage while we add some chairs. Brad, Vincent, Sally. We'll spend a few minutes doing a panel discussion, but after we want to take some questions from you all. So, if there's anything you've been wanting to ask people that are behind the project OpenClaw, it seemed like maybe very many people aren't maintainers here. So, you may not even know what a maintainer is or what it takes. We can chat about that a little bit or you can take some questions after.
Are these all live?
What? I was just wondering if this was on.
Yes. [laughter]
Everyone have a mic?
Yep. One more.
So, first I would love for you to introduce yourself. Talk a little bit briefly about what you're maintaining on OpenClaw and how you came about the project. I'll start with you Val.
Okay. You said talk about myself. My favorite topic, but I'm going to just say I do control UI design UI/UX as well as some of the iOS stuff, not all of it yet, but hopefully more. And the Mac OS app and also Claw Hub V2. So the V2 for the UI for both the Claw Hub and the control UI. But it's mostly me, but also opinions by other people.
And can you all hear? Is the mic close enough?
Okay, a little closer. And then how did you come to join OpenClaw as a maintainer?
Oh, as a maintainer, I had to beg and plead and email and email and email and impress people and make multiple dashboards that were [laughter] very very nice looking only to be told that I have to write it in a new framework. So, it's not going to be as nice looking, but I tried very hard.
And I hopefully made it and if I didn't, I'm open to suggestions. [laughter]
Cool. Okay. I'm Jacob Tomlinson. I work for Nvidia. We're mainly maintaining like providing security assistance to OpenClaw. So we spend a lot of time going through the security advisories that are being opened against OpenClaw and finding out kind of what's noise, what's relevant, what do we need to fix, what can we harden, what can we change within OpenClaw. We also kind of maintain all the NVIDIA integrations and stuff but like that's kind of like a side activity. We got involved because Peter originally reached out to Nvidia to partner with us and see how we could come in and support the project. And there was a few folks like everybody has got a bunch of people working on open source libraries in a bunch of different places and so a few people were pulled together and I just I love open source projects and this seemed like a great opportunity for like multi-institutional open source getting loads of big companies working together to help a nonprofit just seemed like exactly the right thing for me to work on. So that's how I got involved.
