Claw-like Agents in a Microsoft World

OpenClaw landed in November 2025 - 164,000 GitHub stars in ten weeks. By spring 2026 it had a creator at OpenAI, a Microsoft IP license through 2032, an Nvidia-backed sandbox (NemoClaw), an Anthropic-licensed enterprise twin (Copilot Cowork), and a category name: claw-level agents.

This talk is the field report, six months in. Who's shipping what, who's licensing what from whom, who's still pretending nothing happened. Microsoft's enterprise agent harness runs on the same Anthropic technology that powers its named competitor. The 3.3% paid-Copilot conversion explains the urgency behind Ocean 11 - Microsoft's persistent-agent program, revealing at Build the same day as this talk. The cloud-versus-local seam Build 2026 was supposed to resolve.

We at AgentBrew run claw-level agents in daily production - community, company, and individual scale. Coding agents and operator agents. Local and cloud. The talk covers the players a Norwegian audience needs to know: OpenClaw, Claude Code, Cursor, NemoClaw, Copilot Cowork, Ocean 11, and the local-model wave (cost and sovereignty pressure pushing back on cloud-only).

For developers picking what to learn next, and technical leaders deciding where to bet - a map drawn the same week Microsoft drew its own. Not a vendor pitch, not a tutorial, not another governance talk. Three predictions. I'll come back in twelve months and tell you which ones were wrong.

For practitioners running, building, or evaluating autonomous agents in production. No prior agent experience required - just curiosity about where the field is going.