Your next PC will likely run on AI agents

Remember when ChatGPT was just an AI chat box on your desktop? It was like this in December.

Fast forward to now – three whole months later! – and the idea of ​​a desktop app that keeps an AI confined to a chat box seems downright quaint. Starting with ambient coding apps like Claude Code and Codex before going into hyperdrive with OpenClaw, AI is coming out of the chat box and taking over your PC and, by extension, going after your files and personal data.

Of the big three AI vendors, Anthropic is arguably the furthest along in terms of transforming the Claude app into an agentic AI command center, complete with agent coordination tools for coding (Claude Code) and your office (Claude Cowork).

Last week, Anthropic shipped Claude Dispatch, which lets you remotely control Claude desktop agents from the Claude mobile app, while the new Claude Channels let you communicate with Claude Code agent sessions via Discord and Telegram, a feature similar to the capabilities of OpenClaw’s social messaging app.

Anthropic’s Claude’s aggressive moves have left Google and OpenAI scrambling to catch up, and now we’re learning that both companies are doing just that.

Google, which doesn’t even have a general-purpose desktop app for Gemini (unless you count Chrome and its Gemini sidebar), is reportedly testing one now, starting on the Mac side. While it doesn’t appear that the new Gemini desktop app will offer agent or desktop coding capabilities (you can code with Gemini using Google’s standalone Antigravity app), it will supposedly offer “desktop intelligence” functionality that will allow Gemini to see what’s on your computer screen and use that data for context, similar to Microsoft’s Copilot Vision.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is reportedly launching a desktop “superapp” that integrates ChatGPT with Codex, OpenAI’s agent coding app, and the Atlas AI browser, with the new app capable of unleashing AI agents that “work autonomously on a user’s computer to perform a variety of tasks,” such as “writing software and analyzing data.”

Today, all of this is happening against the backdrop of the meteoric rise of OpenClaw, the open-source agentic AI framework that places teams of AI agents on your own computer, all working silently in the background while you give them occasional instructions via WhatsApp, Telegram, or any number of other social messaging apps on your phone.

The hype around OpenClaw – which, keep in mind, was barely on anyone’s radar until just two months ago – is not dying down. It’s now common to hear OpenClaw described not just as an application but rather as an “operating system for AI agents,” and earlier this week, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang went further, calling OpenClaw “the new computer.” Naturally, he said this while unveiling NemoClaw, the “secure” version of Nvidia’s OpenClaw.

Huang is not alone in proclaiming that agentic AI frameworks like OpenClaw are “the new computer.” Take Perplexity, which recently unveiled Personal Computer, an OpenClaw-style agentic AI software setup that lives on a Mac mini, or Meta’s Manus AI, which just launched the OpenClaw-style My Computer.

All of these new agentic AI systems aim to escape the confines of simple desktop applications and become deeply intertwined with your files and your PC. And if we keep talking about privacy and sandboxing, it’s all too easy to allow software like Personal Computer, OpenAI’s upcoming “superapp” and even the Claude desktop app to access your most sensitive files and your PC itself.

Indeed, giving AI agents full access to your computer seems to be the goal, so why not just put AI agents in charge of your PC, right?

That’s the argument anyway, and with their latest desktop applications increasingly focusing on putting AI agents on our desktops, Google, OpenAI and especially Anthropic seem to be heading in that direction.