My Grandma always taught me that “You don’t buy the cow when the milk is free.”  Well, she wasn’t talking about AI agents (at least I don’t think so), but that saying is as true today as it was all those years ago.

I was reminded of Grandma when I saw the news that OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, creator of the OpenClaw project, to head up its Agent AI program.

Ron Schmelzer covered it in Forbes; read it here.

The headline itself tells you everything you need to know. OpenAI hired the creator. It pledged to support OpenClaw as an independent foundation. It did not acquire the project outright. It does not control it.

And here’s the delicious irony.

The project originally had “Clawdbot” in the name. Yes, Claude. As in Anthropic’s Claude. OpenAI is now backing a foundation around a project that originally nodded to a competitor. You can’t make this stuff up. If there’s a better example of how fast alliances, branding and strategy move in AI, I haven’t seen it.

This wasn’t some random talent pickup. This was strategy.

Futurum’s own Dion Hinchcliffe weighed in on LinkedIn with his take.

Dion correctly pointed out that his is not just a hire. It’s positioning.

And we’ve seen this pattern before.

When Apple hired the Styra team, the creators behind Open Policy Agent, the OPA project remained under the stewardship of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The brains moved. The code stayed. The governance stayed. The commercial reality shifted.

We covered that; you can read it here.

Then there’s Windsurf.

First, OpenAI attempted to acquire the whole company for $3 billion.

That deal fell apart. Then Google hired the CEO and licensed the IP in a $2.4 billion arrangement.

After that, Cognition AI acquired the remaining IP and company.

Futurum labeled it what it is in this report. 

The acqui-hire revolution. Buy the brains. License the IP. Leave the governance structure standing. Sort of like “take the cannolis, leave the gun.”

Here’s the thing.

This is becoming the preferred way to acquire strategic capability without acquiring regulatory baggage.

If you are a company eyeing an IPO, and OpenAI reportedly is, you do not want unnecessary antitrust optics. You do not want complicated community ownership debates. You do not want to inherit governance disputes from an open source project with strong opinions and strong personalities.

Supporting an independent foundation looks clean. It reads well in an S-1. It signals ecosystem goodwill.

But it also creates strategic insulation.

OpenClaw has generated enormous visibility. Not all of it positive. And while we joke that there is no such thing as bad PR, there is such a thing as inherited liability.

If OpenAI had acquired the project outright, it would own everything that comes with it. Every licensing nuance. Every governance wrinkle. Every community disagreement.

Instead, it gets proximity without full exposure.

That’s smart.

But DigitalCxOs need to look past the headline and ask a different question.

Who really governs intelligence now?

If OpenAI becomes the largest benefactor of the OpenClaw foundation, does it become first among equals? Funding influences the roadmap. Hiring influences direction. Ecosystem gravity matters.

Influence without ownership is still influence.

And here is where leadership has to get serious.

In the next phase of AI, the most strategic assets may not sit neatly inside vendor boundaries. They will sit inside foundations. Inside hybrid governance structures. Inside ecosystems where independence is technically real but financially supported by one or two dominant players.

This changes vendor risk.

When you adopt an agent framework backed by a foundation heavily funded by a single major AI vendor, you are not simply choosing open source. You are entering a layered power structure.

There is the foundation charter.

There are the maintainers.

There are the sponsors.

And there is the gravitational pull of whoever employs the original visionary.

That matters for procurement.

That matters for roadmap alignment.

That matters for exit strategy.

This is why the Linux Foundation is so successful. No one vendor controls it. There are too many big companies involved for anyone to dominate. This foundation is different.

There’s another angle here that you need to ponder.

Lightning in a bottle is not the same as repeatable institutional innovation.

Peter Steinberger may have captured something special with OpenClaw. Translating that spark into scaled, productized, enterprise-ready capability inside a hyper-growth, IPO-bound organization is a different discipline entirely.

Sometimes, founders thrive inside large platforms. Sometimes the magic was contextual.

Digital leaders betting on agentic AI as core infrastructure need to hedge for both outcomes.

This is not a knock on OpenAI. Quite the opposite. This is sharp execution. It balances ecosystem credibility with corporate ambition. It keeps regulators comfortable. It keeps optionality open.

It is elegant.

But elegance does not eliminate risk for enterprise buyers.

So what should DigitalCxOs actually do?

First, read the foundation governance documents. Not the marketing page. The governance page. Who appoints board members? How are maintainers selected? What happens if a primary sponsor withdraws funding?

Second, diversify your dependencies. If your AI agent strategy depends entirely on one framework closely associated with one vendor, you are concentrated. Not diversified.

Third, track talent, not just repositories. When the architects move, ecosystems move.

Fourth, be honest about leverage. If your production implementation ultimately depends on proprietary APIs, hosted services and vendor-specific extensions, the “free milk” narrative may be more branding than strategy.

And let’s come back to the irony for a second.

OpenAI backing a foundation around a project that originally had “Clawdbot” in the name is the perfect snapshot of the AI era. Competitors borrow from each other. Talent crosses borders. Projects evolve. Brand names shift. Governance becomes the real chessboard.

Grandma didn’t have to understand AI agents to understand leverage.

Sometimes you don’t need to buy the cow.

You just need to make sure the milk keeps flowing in your direction.

But if you are the one building your enterprise strategy around that milk, you’d better know who feeds the cow, who owns the barn, and who writes the pasture rules.

Because in this market, independence and influence are not opposites. They’re partners.

And for DigitalCxOs navigating the agentic AI wave, the real question isn’t whether OpenAI made a smart move.

It’s whether you are.

Got milk?