OpenClaw has evolved rapidly since its creation as a weekend project by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger in late 2025. By February, when OpenAI hired Steinberger, the self-hosted AI agent had already surpassed 100,000 GitHub stars. Now, with the launch of OpenClaw Enterprise (OCE), the project is making a clear push into serious business use.
OCE is an open-source, vendor-neutral platform designed to give IT administrators centralized control over agents that might otherwise operate without oversight. At its core is the OpenClaw Control Plane (OCC), which allows administrators to deploy agents, separate them into isolated namespaces, manage configuration and credentials, set permissions, and track changes. Agent activity itself runs separately through gateways and harnesses that handle message reception, agent turns, model calls, and tool execution.
In a blog post announcing the platform, Kevin Lin, a member of technical staff at OpenAI leading OCE efforts, noted that many companies still struggle to police agent platforms centrally. "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," Lin wrote. "As a consequence, the default stance of IT in most organizations is to ban agentic platforms like OpenClaw altogether."
The OpenClaw Foundation, established earlier this year, oversees the project with support from sponsors including OpenAI, Nvidia, Red Hat, and GitHub. Lin described OCE as "being developed in the open before its 1.0 release" later this year, adding that it is currently suitable only for internal pilot projects.