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Artificial intelligence has expanded beyond conversational chatbots to execute real-world tasks such as booking flights and organizing inboxes. With the emergence of wearable integrations, AI agent tools like OpenClaw are now being deployed through smart glasses, extending their reach into physical environments.
OpenClaw's creator, Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger, says the shift has been building for years and is now arriving all at once.
"2023-2024 was the year of ChatGPT, last year was the year of the coding agent, this year's going to be the year of the general agent," Steinberger told Agence France-Presse (AFP) during a gathering for OpenClaw enthusiasts in Tokyo.
Steinberger built OpenClaw in November while experimenting with AI coding tools to organize his own digital life. The tool, whose symbol is a bright red lobster, can be connected to existing AI models and operated through instant messaging apps - instructed, as Steinberger describes it, "as if to a friend or colleague."
The result was something few anticipated. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, this month called OpenClaw "the next ChatGPT." Shortly after, OpenAI boss Sam Altman announced Steinberger had been hired "to drive the next generation of personal agents."
Steinberger is candid about why the breakthrough came from outside the industry's biggest players.
"Those companies would have worried too much about what could go wrong instead of just, I wanted to just show people I've been into the future," he said.
The latest development in OpenClaw's expansion moves AI agents entirely beyond the screen. Developers within the OpenClaw community have begun building integrations on the Rokid Glasses Developer Kit, a platform that lets users access AI experiences through voice and visual interaction.
Rokid's AI glasses combine multimodal AI with a lightweight design built for all-day wear. Equipped with advanced displays, noise-canceling microphones, a high-resolution camera, and private directional speakers, the glasses allow users to interact with digital information through sight, sound, and speech.
"Although they are already equipped with powerful AI-driven features, we are always exploring new avenues to increase our product's usefulness," said Gary Cai, vice president at Rokid.
Smart glasses are increasingly becoming a natural extension of smartphones for daily use, and the integration signals that wearables are emerging as a new gateway for deploying AI applications.
Rokid's platform was also the first AI glasses to feature globally native integration with multiple large language models, including Google Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT, an architecture that lets developers and users personalize their AI experience rather than rely on a single closed system.
OpenClaw has found a particularly enthusiastic user base in China, where people have been quick to embrace its potential to organize emails, assist with coding, and handle a range of other digital tasks. The tool's popularity there has also drawn attention from Chinese national cybersecurity authorities and Beijing's IT ministry, which have issued official warnings over potential risks.
Steinberger acknowledges the concern, says, "If you build a hammer… you can hurt yourself. So should we not build hammers anymore?"
He is also aware of a competitive dimension. "If you see it as a competition, it certainly looks like China is gaining a lot of momentum" in the AI sector, Steinberger said, though he added that "there's still quite a bit of a leap between the best models from China and the best models in the US."
At Monday's "ClawCon" event in Tokyo, where many of the hundreds of participants arrived dressed as lobsters, Steinberger spoke about a goal that goes beyond technology.
"I love that I helped a lot of people to bring AI from this scary thing into something that is fun and weird and gets them excited, because we need to make it good for this next century," he said.
"We need more people to think more about AI."
With OpenClaw now inside OpenAI, a growing developer community behind Rokid's wearable platform and AI agents moving from screens to smart glasses, 2026 may well deliver on that ambition.
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