Meta is building a “highly personalised AI assistant to carry out everyday tasks” for its billions of users, according to the Financial Times as reported by Reuters. Google is developing a “24/7 personal agent for work, school and daily life, powered by Gemini,” according to Business Insider. The parallel moves mark an escalation in what analysts are now calling the “agentic wars.”
The OpenClaw Catalyst
The immediate trigger, according to multiple analysts quoted by CNBC, is OpenClaw’s viral adoption earlier this year. “The open source agent demonstrated a genuine appetite for AI that acts rather than just gives answers,” Nick Patience, AI lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC.
OpenAI moved first. In February, Sam Altman announced that OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger was joining OpenAI, with the open-source project moving to a foundation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called OpenClaw “the next ChatGPT.” Three months later, Meta and Google are deploying massive resources to capture the same market.
From Cost Centers to Revenue Infrastructure
The competitive pressure is visible, but there is a “deeper logic,” Patience told CNBC. “Agents represent the point at which AI platforms shift from cost centres to revenue infrastructure, whether through commerce, advertising or enterprise productivity.”
For Meta and Google, which both run large advertising and ecommerce businesses, agents that conduct transactions could be a “major value driver,” according to Malik Ahmed Khan, senior analyst at Morningstar, quoted in the same report.
Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran framed it as a lock-in play. “Agents can create more engagement, utility and lock-in customers on their platforms due to the ability to deliver more tangible value,” he told CNBC. “Also, agents have higher stickiness due to the continuing learning and user context they gain over a period.”
The Governance Problem Nobody Has Solved
The race to ship comes with unresolved risk. In February, a Meta employee went viral after posting about OpenClaw deleting a large amount of emails on its own. The incident highlighted the gap between shipping agents and governing them.
“The shift from AI systems that say the wrong thing to AI systems that do the wrong thing is a qualitatively different risk management challenge,” Patience told CNBC. “Most enterprises, and arguably most vendors, aren’t yet equipped to handle it at scale.”
The Competitive Map
The agentic market is no longer a side project for any major lab. AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC this week that agents were driving “huge demand” in the AI cycle. Craig Le Clair, principal analyst at Forrester, said agentic development “is not a side project; it is the theme of their 2026 roadmaps and represents a pivot from search to action.”
The competition now spans Big Tech, frontier model companies, incumbent software vendors, and startups. “The agentic wars are well under way,” William Blair co-head of tech equity research Arjun Bhatia told CNBC.
What Separates the Winners
The question is no longer whether agents will become the primary interface. It is who controls that interface. OpenAI bet on distribution and UX by hiring Steinberger. Google is folding its agent into Gemini, leveraging its existing user base across Gmail, Calendar, and Drive. Meta is building on its 3+ billion user platform. Each approach reflects a different theory of moat: raw model capability (OpenAI), ecosystem integration (Google), or sheer user scale (Meta). The next six months will reveal which theory holds.