Meta and Snowflake chase the OpenClaw craze
Today on Product Saturday: Manus gets in on the desktop agent craze three months after joining Meta, Snowflake introduces a new task-competition platform based around user data, and the quote of the week.
Today on Product Saturday: Manus gets in on the desktop agent craze three months after joining Meta, Snowflake introduces a new task-competition platform based around user data, and the quote of the week.
Welcome to Runtime! Today on Product Saturday: Manus gets in on the desktop agent craze three months after joining Meta, Snowflake introduces a new task-competition platform based around user data, and the quote of the week.
Please forward this email to a friend or colleague! If it was forwarded to you, sign up here to get Runtime each week, and if you value independent enterprise tech journalism, click the button below and become a Runtime supporter today.
Rankin' files: After fifteen years of moving enterprise applications into the cloud and SaaSifying everything else, the hottest product of 2026 is a desktop application. This week at GTC Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared that "every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy," and Manus decided this week that it was ready to ship a desktop version of its previously cloud-based AI assistant three months after Meta paid $2 billion for the company.
My Computer "executes command line instructions (CLI) in your computer's terminal. This allows it to read, analyze, and edit local files, as well as launch and control your local applications," the company said in a blog post. It can also write code and create new desktop applications, and while some CIOs might be skeptical about letting anything associated with Meta handle their corporate data, "we understand that letting an AI work on your local computer requires trust," Manus said.
Snow Crab was right there: Companies that think Jensen is right about OpenClaw would like to find similar ways to use AI to automate everyday business tasks sourced from their corporate data without experiencing the Wild West of AI. Snowflake introduced a new service this week called SnowWork that runs on desktops and connects to Snowflake data to "securely complete multi-step tasks based on conversational prompts," the company said in a press release.
OpenClaw's security problems are pretty well documented for a product that hasn't been around that long, and Snowflake is not the first, nor will it be the last, enterprise vendor that wants to convince customers they can have their agentic cake and eat it, too. "Unlike general-purpose AI agents, Project SnowWork is built on a single enterprise-wide source of truth with governed metrics, shared business definitions, cross-cloud interoperability, and built-in security and auditability," it said in the release.
Chain of foos: AI-driven software development allows teams to move really fast, with all the obvious upsides and downsides that come along with velocity. Chainguard helps developers make sure they're pulling frequently used software libraries from trustworthy sources, and this week it introduced two new services that extend that protection as software teams evolve around these new tools.
Chainguard OS Packages allows teams to have more control over how they put images together while still using vetted packages from Chainguard's library, and Chainguard Repository brings several different Chainguard products into a single vault for both human and AI developers to access. "It gives engineering teams one trusted source for open source artifacts, with security and compliance enforced automatically at the point of consumption," the company said in a blog post.
Silver lining: Ransomware has faded a bit from the headlines due to all the, uh, other stuff that's going on, but it remains a serious problem that any company operating on the internet needs to think about. Founded by ex-AWS engineers, Eon has raised nearly $500 million to work on secure data backup and recovery in the ransomware era, and this week it introduced a new cloud database protection service.
Eon's new platform "detects threats and validates recovery points without expanding the attack surface," the company said in a press release. It works across "Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL, RDS, and other cloud databases," according to the company, and allows customers to "investigate corrupted data and restore only trusted records without rebuilding entire environments."
Black and white: The changes that AI tools are bringing to the software-development process are pretty well understood at this point, but security teams are also navigating new ways to detect and respond to threats. Portland's own Orca Security introduced a new set of AI agents to its platform that can help defenders understand how their companies are using AI and identify weak points.
The new agents allow for "real-time detection of AI usage across cloud environments, remediation-focused workflows, and code reachability analysis," Orca said in a press release. Understanding the full scope of what's actually happening on their networks remains an enormous problem for companies of a certain size, and new AI tools are opening up new avenues for the bad guys with every OpenClaw download.
Enterprise AI appears to have reached a tipping point, according to new research from PagerDuty. Nearly 60% of respondents said they are "actively incorporating AI in digital operations," and while that statement could be interpreted pretty broadly it does feel like momentum is starting to take off after years of breathless hype.
"Something I don't think we talk about as much, and I wish we talked a little bit more about with AI coding, is there's kind of this implicit assumption that the AI is writing code that a human would have otherwise written. But I think one of the things that we're finding is actually, like, the AI is actually writing code that nobody was going to write." — Brendan Burns, corporate vice president and technical fellow at Microsoft, arguing that software developers worried about getting automated out of a job can rest a little easier, for now anyway.
Super Micro shares fell an astonishing 33% Friday after the U.S. government accused three executives of illegally funneling servers with Nvidia GPUs to China.
Today's adventures in late capitalism: A company that manages in-vehicle breathalyzers for people who are legally required to use them before driving was hit by some sort of cyberattack last week that has disabled cars across the country, according to TechCrunch.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!