How Microsoft took on the OpenClaw fad

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Microsoft's Omar Shahine thinks knowledge workers will soon delegate a lot of their busywork to its new personal assistant, Anthropic details how Claude is building Claude, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Scout's honor?

SAN FRANCISCO — Earlier this year Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared that "every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy," referring to the open-source AI personal assistant introduced last November that wants to have the same impact on email jobs that Claude Code had on software development. OpenClaw has been a smash hit with the early adopter crowd, but CIOs concerned about data security need a little more convincing.

This week Microsoft unveiled Scout, a business-oriented personal assistant built on top of OpenClaw, at its Microsoft Build developer conference. "Most people don't have personal assistants in the world, but some people do, and this is about giving as many people who do want a personal assistant that capability," said Omar Shahine, corporate vice president at Microsoft, in an interview with Runtime.

• Scout was designed to work within Microsoft Teams and through a desktop app to manage your calendar, file expenses, and create documents for upcoming meetings based on your Microsoft 365 data, among other things.
• Users set it up as if they were onboarding a new intern, giving Scout a unique name and some direction on the types of tasks it should expect to handle when contacted through Teams or email.
• "The important thing here is we want people to understand that the distinguishing characteristic of this product is you're talking to it in a communications product you use to talk to people," Shahine said.

Security appears to have been an afterthought during OpenClaw's development, which even Microsoft pointed out earlier this year. Scout is a much more locked-down version of OpenClaw, Shahine said, with access to many of the same administration tools that companies use to manage their Microsoft 365 deployments.

• "In terms of managing it, it's like managing a person; IT has the same capabilities in terms of discoverability, e-discovery, auditing, reporting, adversarial scans as they would on an individual human being," Shahine said.
• A big part of the joy and terror of using OpenClaw is allowing it to complete tasks on its own so that the user doesn't have to hit "approve" before every single action, but that's a tough sell inside the enterprise.
• Scout users will have to opt in to basically every feature offered by the assistant, and all "write" operations — where Scout takes action — have to be approved by the end user, he said.
• Companies will also be able to set their own controls across their organization governing what Scout is allowed to access and do.

These are super early days for agentic AI personal assistants; OpenClaw itself didn't exist until last November, and it's going to require a lot of experimentation to understand how and why knowledge workers want to use this kind of tool. Scout is just the first of several "Autopilots," or "autonomous, long-running agents with full enterprise compliance that run in your tenant," that Microsoft plans to introduce over time, CEO Satya Nadella said in his Build keynote.

• Shahine declined to share any details about how Microsoft plans to charge for Autopilots like Scout, including whether or not customers will be billed on a consumption basis or if Autopilots will be a new tier of the Microsoft 365 subscription plans.
• However, "I will say that this stuff uses a lot of inference, because the really good models, which is what makes these things extremely good, they're expensive," Shahine said.
• While tools like Scout could make some employees more productive, companies are going to face a lot of choices over the next couple of years about how and where they want to allocate their inference budgets as the price of inference goes up.
• And if faced with a choice between allowing developers to ship more code versus helping Steve from finance manage his email, Steve is going to have to make a pretty good pitch.

Flywheel or ouroboros?

Anthropic is pretty notorious at this point for issuing warnings about the future impact that AI could have on the world while hyping the game-changing capabilities of its own AI at the same time. On Thursday it alerted the tech world that "recursive self-improvement," or AI that builds AI, might be closer than we think.

"As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude," the company said in a blog post. The company is also using Claude to handle the code-review problem that tripped up Amazon earlier this year, and said that if had been using automated code review earlier Claude would have detected one-third of the bugs that have caused the many, many outages Anthropic has had to manage as demand for its services soared.

There's no guarantee that Claude's progress means the machines are about to take over the world, but Anthropic isn't ruling it out either. "We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology," the company wrote [emphasis theirs], and good luck with that.

Enterprise moves

Josh Fecteau is now chief data and AI officer and CIO of Teradata, adding the CIO responsibilities to his current role as CDAO.

Paras Malhotra is the new chief information security officer at Starburst, joining the data company after security leadership roles at Datadog and AWS.

Tifenn Dano Kwan is the new chief marketing officer at Zendesk, joining the customer experience company after similar roles at Amplitude and SAP.

The Runtime roundup

Nvidia acquired Kumo, which makes AI models to run against relational data, for $400 million, according to The Information.

Cloudflare acquired VoidZero, which developed the open-source Vite web-app building tool, for an undisclosed amount.

Shares of Broadcom fell more than 12% Thursday after it missed Wall Street's estimates for quarterly revenue.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!