OpenClaw vs Claude Code: Remote Control Agents

Two tools that have recently landed, taken together, define what the next phase of AI agent competition looks like. On February 25, Anthropic released Remote Control for Claude Code — a feature that lets developers continue coding sessions from any phone or tablet while keeping all execution local. Meanwhile, OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent that became one of the fastest-growing GitHub repositories in history, is heading into new hands: creator Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI in mid-February to lead personal AI agents there.

Neither of these is a minor product update. Together, they mark a concrete shift in how the industry is thinking about AI agents — away from sessions that start and end at a desktop, toward agents that operate continuously, follow you across devices, and act on your behalf whether or not you’re watching.

What Each Product Actually Does

The differences between OpenClaw and Claude Code Remote Control start with what they’re designed for.

Claude Code is Anthropic’s agentic coding tool, which hit a $2.5 billion annualized run rate in February 2026 — more than doubling since the start of the year — and now accounts for an estimated 4 percent of all public GitHub commits. Until this week, the tool ran as a terminal process on your local machine or in Anthropic’s cloud. Remote Control changes the input layer: developers run claude remote-control (or /rc) in a session, which generates a QR code or session URL they can open on any iOS or Android device or in any browser. The session keeps executing locally on the original machine; the phone becomes a remote window into it.

The security design is deliberate. No inbound ports are opened on the user’s machine. Anthropic emphasizes that all execution remains local on the user’s machine, with traffic secured via TLS through its API using short-lived credentials. It’s built for a specific use case: a developer who’s mid-task in a complex local environment — with MCP servers, custom tools, local files — who needs to step away from their desk without losing the thread. At launch, it’s gated to Claude Max subscribers ($100–200/month), with Claude Pro ($20/month) access coming next.

OpenClaw is a different animal. It’s a free, open-source autonomous AI agent that operates primarily through messaging apps — WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, iMessage. Instead of a terminal or IDE, your interface is a chat window you already have on your phone. OpenClaw runs locally on your machine, connects to whatever AI model you supply API keys for (Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, or local alternatives), and executes tasks across your system: managing files and shell commands, automating browsers, checking in on flights, managing calendars, controlling smart home devices, running scheduled background jobs, and writing and reviewing code. It currently offers more than 100 bundled skills out of the box — with over 700 available through ClawHub — and 50+ service integrations.

The appeal is scope. Claude Code is a power tool for one domain. OpenClaw tries to be the AI layer across everything you do.

The Shared Thesis: AI That Follows You

Despite their differences, both products are built on the same insight: the device-session model of AI — open an app, type, get an answer, close — is being replaced by something more persistent. The next generation of AI assistants doesn’t wait to be opened. It runs in the background, maintains state across sessions, and is accessible wherever you happen to be.

This shift has significant implications. The value of an AI agent increases substantially when it can continue working after you put your phone down, when it remembers what it was doing when you come back, and when it can report back to you in whatever interface is most convenient at that moment. OpenClaw was built around this from the start — its architecture combines persistent memory, browser automation, and system-level access specifically to enable agents that plan and act over time. Anthropic is arriving at the same destination from a different direction: starting with a powerful developer-facing product and adding continuity and cross-device access as the use case demands it.

Apple’s recent integration of agentic coding into Xcode follows the same logic applied to a different surface. The pattern across every major platform is the same: agents that are always on, always accessible, always aware of context.

Where They Diverge: Scope, Security, and Business Model

The differences matter as much as the similarities, and they map onto three dimensions: scope, security, and who owns the ecosystem.

1. Scope: Claude Code Remote Control is a coding tool that happens to be accessible from any device. OpenClaw is a general-purpose agent that happens to support coding. For developers whose entire professional life runs inside a terminal, Claude Code’s depth is more valuable than OpenClaw’s breadth. For everyone else, OpenClaw’s ambition — one agent across your whole digital life — is harder to replicate.
2. Security: This is where the products diverge most sharply. Claude Code Remote Control has a tightly controlled security model: local execution, encrypted relay, no raw code exposed to Anthropic’s servers, enterprise-grade access controls baked in from the start. OpenClaw’s open-source model has led to real security incidents. Cisco’s AI security research team found that a third-party OpenClaw skill performed data exfiltration and prompt injection without user awareness. The skill repository, driven by community contributions, lacked vetting mechanisms to catch malicious submissions. OpenClaw’s creator publicly acknowledged the problem before leaving for OpenAI; it remains a structural vulnerability in any community-driven skill ecosystem. For enterprise developers or anyone with sensitive codebases, this asymmetry is significant.
3. Ecosystem ownership: Claude Code Remote Control exists inside Anthropic’s controlled product — one model, one platform, one set of security guarantees. OpenClaw is model-agnostic by design, open-source, community-extended, and runs on whatever hardware you own. Depending on your priorities, this is either its greatest strength (flexibility, no vendor lock-in, free) or its greatest weakness (inconsistent quality, security risk, no support tier).

The OpenAI Wildcard

The most consequential dimension of this comparison isn’t the products themselves — it’s what comes next.

Steinberger built OpenClaw, watched it accumulate 150,000 GitHub stars and become a reference point for what a personal AI agent can look like, and then took that entire playbook to OpenAI. His title there is head of personal AI agents. That’s not an acqui-hire into an unrelated role; it’s a signal that OpenAI sees the exact use case OpenClaw pioneered — always-on, messaging-first, model-agnostic, cross-device — as a priority product direction.

Anthropic’s response is already visible. Remote Control is one piece. Cowork — released in January — extends Claude’s agentic capabilities to non-developers through a desktop tool that can run automated file and task workflows. The Windows expansion made clear that Anthropic is building toward ubiquitous Claude access, not a single flagship product.

What to Watch

Three questions will determine how this plays out.

First, how far does Anthropic extend Remote Control’s scope? Today it’s coding sessions. The underlying architecture — secure local execution with a cloud relay for remote access — could support other long-running Claude tasks. If Anthropic extends this to Cowork, or to any agentic workflow running on Claude, the product starts to look a lot more like OpenClaw’s vision.

Second, what does OpenAI actually build with Steinberger? The timeline from “he joined” to “product ships” is likely 12 to 18 months at a large company. When something does ship, it will presumably have OpenAI’s model capabilities, distribution through ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users, and the design sensibility of someone who already shipped this concept as a solo project.

Third, can the open-source ecosystem solve the security problem? OpenClaw’s community is real and the skill library is genuinely useful. But the Cisco findings established that uncurated community plugins create attack surfaces that sophisticated users may not anticipate. Whether the post-Steinberger stewardship model — an open-source foundation — can implement credible vetting at scale will determine whether OpenClaw remains viable against well-resourced corporate alternatives.

The “AI follows you” paradigm is establishing itself faster than most predicted. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Apple are all building toward it from their respective positions.