NVIDIA announced on Monday the NVIDIA NemoClaw™ stack for the OpenClaw agent platform — which lets users install NVIDIA Nemotron™ models and the newly announced NVIDIA OpenShell™ runtime in a single command — adding privacy and security controls to make self-evolving, autonomous AI agents, or claws, more trustworthy, scalable and accessible to the world.
“OpenClaw opened the next frontier of AI to everyone and became the fastest-growing open source project in history,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Mac and Windows are the operating systems for the personal computer. OpenClaw is the operating system for personal AI. This is the moment the industry has been waiting for — the beginning of a new renaissance in software.”
“OpenClaw brings people closer to AI and helps create a world where everyone has their own agents,” said Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw. “With NVIDIA and the broader ecosystem, we’re building the claws and guardrails that let anyone create powerful, secure AI assistants.”
NVIDIA’s launch of NemoClaw comes as the tech giant seeks to capitalize on—and provide a safety net for—a viral AI phenomenon in China known as “raising lobsters.”
Named for the crustacean logo of the open-source OpenClaw platform, the trend has seen many Chinese users rush to install autonomous AI agents capable of managing emails, booking travel, and executing code. However, the meteoric rise of these “claws” has triggered a surge in “installation hacks” and security warnings from Chinese regulators, as novice users grant deep system access to unverified software.
According to a statement, NemoClaw uses NVIDIA Agent Toolkit software to optimize OpenClaw in a single command. It installs OpenShell to provide open models and an isolated sandbox that adds data privacy and security to autonomous agents. This provides the missing infrastructure layer beneath claws to give them the access they need to be productive, while enforcing policy-based security, network and privacy guardrails.
NemoClaw uses any coding agent. With open agents, it can tap open models — including NVIDIA Nemotron — running locally on the user’s dedicated system. Using a privacy router, agents can use frontier models running in the cloud. This combination of local and cloud models provides a foundation for agents to develop and learn new skills to complete tasks according to defined privacy and security guardrails.
Launched in November, OpenClaw is an agent that leverages large language models (LLMs) to perform daily functions.
Major Chinese cloud computing providers, such as Tencent Holdings Ltd, Baidu and Alibaba Group, have rushed to offer OpenClaw to their customers, while LLM providers like MiniMax and Zhipu have offered tokens that power the agents, Bloomberg reported.
OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent platform that does more than the traditional chatbots. Instead of answering questions, these agents can complete tasks, make decisions and take actions with minimal input from users.
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