OpenClaw Releases Free AI-Agent Management Software for Internal Enterprise Pilots

Companies can now run OpenClaw’s new agent-management software on their own infrastructure without paying for the control layer. The OpenClaw Foundation released OpenClaw Enterprise on September 29, 2026, to put permissions, security boundaries and auditing around persistent AI agents. The important constraint sits beside that offer: the foundation currently considers it suitable for internal pilot workloads, not a finished 1.0 platform.

Managing the fleet, not choosing its brain

OpenClaw Enterprise, or OCE, is a control plane: a central management layer for deploying agents and governing their activity. It is not a new AI model or a standalone assistant. Its job is to organize agents, users and workloads under common administration, rather than define how an individual agent reasons through a task.

That distinction shapes its design. OCE adds multi-tenancy—administration for multiple tenants—along with security boundaries, governance across an agent’s lifecycle and auditability. Those controls address the organizational side of deployment: separating workloads, managing permissions and making agent activity traceable. They surround the agent rather than replace the software that performs its work.

Organizations can substitute three underlying components: the model, the agent harness and the sandbox. The harness is the operating software around the model; the sandbox is its isolated execution environment. OpenClaw says each can be replaced with a third-party option or an internal implementation. The stated aim is centralized governance without requiring every part of the stack to come from one vendor.

Security controls instead of a blanket ban

The foundation frames the release as a response to organizations asking for stronger security, safety and governance before adopting persistent agents. It says the default response from IT in most organizations has been to ban platforms such as OpenClaw. That is the foundation’s account of the deployment barrier, not a measured adoption rate.

OCE’s proposed answer combines hard boundaries between trusted and untrusted workloads, sandboxing, fine-grained permissions and reviews performed by language models. These are distinct protections, not simply a better prompt telling an agent what it should avoid. The foundation identifies security as the primary focus and says it will publish a reference architecture explaining how the protections work together.

OpenAI’s pilot reaches into its code

The project began at OpenAI, which donated it to the OpenClaw Foundation. According to the launch announcement, it is now an independent project developed in collaboration with Red Hat and NVIDIA. OpenAI and Red Hat are piloting OCE internally, giving the release examples of organizational use alongside its invitation for outside contributors.

OpenClaw says OpenAI already runs agents with full access to codebases and plugins. In a testimonial included in the announcement, OpenAI technical staff member RJ Marsan describes Androidclaw, an internal agent connected to company context, Git, GitHub and logging systems. His examples show the kind of sensitive, action-taking work the governance layer is intended to support.

Marsan says Androidclaw can locate the pull request behind a broken build and help fix it. He also describes it tracing a streaming problem, publishing a pull request with video evidence and merging the change. These are attributed internal-use examples, not independent performance tests or a guarantee that another organization’s deployment will behave the same way.

Two deployment routes, one unfinished milestone

The source is available now, and the announcement directs organizations to the repository and getting-started guide. OpenClaw identifies two deployment routes, separating local development from an internal installation:

• Docker Compose for local development.
• Kubernetes for deployment on the organization’s internal infrastructure.

The foundation promises the platform will always be free for organizations to use. VentureBeat reports that OCE carries the permissive MIT License. The offer is therefore a free, self-hostable management layer, rather than a hosted service that bundles the infrastructure and model access needed to execute tasks.

OpenClaw says it deliberately opened the code early so developers and organizations could help shape the platform before a planned 1.0 release later in 2026. Its forthcoming security reference architecture is another concrete deliverable. For teams evaluating OCE now, the launch offers code to pilot and controls to examine—not a declaration that enterprise deployment is a solved problem.