OpenClaw slips on a suit to evade widespread business bans

The OpenClaw project has started work on an enterprise edition in the hope that businesses lose their fear of the agentic AI project. OpenClaw was one of the first AI harnesses" - tools that use a large language model to create a digital assistant that automates tasks. If users allow OpenClaw to access their email account, it can analyze messages and fire off AI-generated replies, even responding to meeting invitations and reserving time in a calendar app. The tool is the creation of developer Peter Steinberger, who released it to initial acclaim - and then consternation as security analysts found OpenClaw was a mess. Analyst firm Gartner labelled the project a source of unacceptable cybersecurity risk" for business users, and China's Computer Emergency Response Team warned of extremely weak default security configurations." That didn't stop OpenAI hiring Steinberger and making OpenClaw the center of its plans to build personal AI agents. Speaking of OpenAI, news of work on OpenClaw Enterprise (OCE) came from a post by one of its staffers, Kevin Lin, who admitted actual deployment of persistent agents remains limited." The main feedback we hear from organizations is that a stronger common security, safety, and governance standard is needed before agents can be fully adopted. As a consequence, the default stance of IT in most organizations is to ban agentic platforms like OpenClaw altogether." This is the problem we are trying to solve with OCE: how do we safely deploy powerful agents without nerfing their capabilities in enterprise environments?" Lin said work on version 1.0 of OCE is under way and that it introduces an enterprise-grade control plane for agents and builds upon the foundation set by OpenClaw with support for multi-tenancy, hard security boundaries, and standardized agentic primitives." OCE adds governance and auditability across the agent lifecycle while making sure that core primitives like the harness, model, and sandbox can be swapped out with third party solutions as well as internal implementations." Lin said work on the project originally started at OpenAI and then was donated to the OpenClaw Foundation." Joe Fernandes, veep and general manager of Red Hat's AI Business Unit, likened OCE to RHEL and OpenShift, in that Red Hat intends to make an open source project suitable for serious use. Linux helped enterprises move applications from proprietary Unix systems and specialized hardware onto an open operating system running on industry-standard infrastructure," he wrote in a Tuesday post. Later, containers and Kubernetes helped drive another transformation toward cloud-native applications composed of distributed microservices." That mention of Kubernetes is likely no accident, as the OCE GitHub repo urges coders to think of the project as Kubernetes for agents." If OCE can achieve anywhere near the industry acceptance of Kubernetes, it will have done very well indeed. OCE emerged on the same day that OpenAI debuted its own dots" personal agents, and in the same month that Meta delivered a product called Muse" that offers OpenClaw-like automation for individuals and small businesses. (R)