By now, you've probably heard of OpenClaw — the open source AI agent that racked up 145,000 GitHub stars in two weeks and had half the internet posting productivity demos of an AI that books flights, triages inboxes, and automates multi-step workflows while you sleep. You've probably also heard that its creator, Peter Steinberger, just joined OpenAI to "drive the next generation of personal agents," with OpenClaw itself moving to a foundation under OpenAI's support.

And here's the thing — OpenAI probably wasn't hiring Peter for his coding chops or deep AI research credentials. They were hiring his creative vision. OpenClaw's breakthrough wasn't technical sophistication; it was the imagination to see what a personal AI agent should feel like and the design instinct to make 145,000 developers agree. That's the edge OpenAI wanted to capture.

Full disclosure: I'm one of those tinkerers. Like a lot of you, I bought a Mac Mini specifically to build my first digital employee with OpenClaw. It's genuinely exciting to experiment with — but it's also made clear to me why this isn't ready for the enterprise. It requires serious experimentation, guardrails that don't exist yet, and security hardening that most teams aren't equipped to do on their own.

But while OpenClaw pushes the bleeding edge, it also exposes the bleeding wounds. Cisco's AI security team called it "an absolute nightmare" after a third-party skill silently exfiltrated data. Simon Willison flagged a "lethal trifecta" of risks: private data access, untrusted content ingestion, and external communication — all compounded by persistent memory. Palo Alto Networks confirmed the findings. Cisco found that 26% of the 31,000 community-built skills contained at least one vulnerability. A one-click remote code execution flaw (CVE-2026-25253) dropped this week. Enterprise audits are already finding unauthorized OpenClaw deployments running within corporate networks—shadow AI with privileged access that IT never approved.

The good news: there are already secure, enterprise-ready alternatives. Within days of OpenClaw going viral, Anthropic launched Cowork Plugins on January 30, and OpenAI followed with Frontier on February 5 — both designed for organizations where security, governance, and reliability aren't optional—no coding required for either. Cowork Plugins install with a click; Frontier is managed by your IT team. Here's what each platform offers, how they compare, and what you can start using today.

AI LESSON

OpenClaw's creator joined OpenAI. Here's why.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are moving beyond chatbot models toward something more ambitious: AI systems that plan, execute, and deliver finished work across your business tools. They're approaching the problem from different directions — Anthropic from the individual desktop up, OpenAI from the enterprise infrastructure down. Understanding both approaches helps you make better decisions about where to invest your time and budget. I've been testing Cowork Plugins since their launch, and the guide below reflects what actually works—including what doesn't.

Pricing and features verified February 17, 2026. Both products are in early release; details are subject to change.

What it is: Cowork is a feature within the Claude Desktop app for macOS that enables Claude to take on complex, multi-step tasks autonomously—reading files, creating documents, organizing folders, and running research. Plugins, launched January 30, extend this by bundling pre-built skills, connectors, slash commands, and sub-agents into installable packages focused on specific business functions.

Who can use it: Anyone with a paid Claude subscription. Pro costs $20/month, while Max runs $100-$200/month depending on usage tier. The only difference between tiers is how much you can use before hitting rate limits — features are identical. macOS only for now.

The 11 launch plugins span Productivity, Sales, Marketing, Legal, Finance, Data, Customer Support, Product Management, Enterprise Search, Biology Research, and Plugin Create (build your own). The most polished for general business use are Sales, Legal, Productivity, and Marketing. All plugins are open source and available on GitHub.

How to install a plugin:

Step 1: Open the Claude Desktop app on macOS and navigate to the Cowork tab

Step 2: Click "Plugins" in the left sidebar

Step 3: Browse available plugins and click to install

Step 4: Type / or click the "+" button to access plugin commands during any Cowork session

Time: Under 2 minutes to install. Customization takes 10-30 minutes depending on complexity.

What makes plugins different from regular prompting: Each plugin comes with domain-specific skills that fire automatically when relevant, plus slash commands you can invoke directly. The sales plugin, for example, connects to your CRM, learns your sales process, and gives you commands like /sales:call-prep and /sales:prospect-research. You're not writing prompts from scratch — you're configuring an assistant that already knows the workflow patterns for that role.

A concrete example: Say you're a sales manager preparing for a quarterly business review. Instead of spending 45 minutes pulling data from your CRM, scanning recent email threads, and building a call summary, you type /sales:call-prep Acme Corp. Cowork pulls the CRM record, scans linked emails, identifies open deals and recent activity, and produces a briefing doc with talking points, risk flags, and suggested next steps — in under three minutes. That's the difference between a chatbot and a workflow agent.

What it is: Frontier is an enterprise platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents that connect to a company's existing business systems — CRMs, data warehouses, ticketing tools, and internal applications. OpenAI describes it as giving AI coworkers "the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries."

Who can use it: Not you. Not yet. Frontier launched on February 5 to a limited set of customers, including HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Uber. TechCrunch reported that broader availability is expected over the next several months. This is an enterprise sales conversation, not a self-serve product.

What Frontier does differently: Where Cowork gives an individual user an AI assistant on their desktop, Frontier operates at the organizational level. It connects siloed enterprise systems so AI agents can reason across them. Each agent gets its own identity with scoped permissions — similar to how IT departments manage employee access. Agents build memories from past interactions that improve future performance, and built-in evaluation tools show what's working.

Key distinction: Frontier is compatible with agents built by OpenAI, agents that enterprises build themselves, and agents from third parties, including Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic. This is a management layer, not a walled garden. OpenAI also provides Forward-Deployed Engineers to help enterprise teams design architectures and deploy agents to production.

Cowork Plugins are for individuals and small teams who want AI that does real work on their desktop right now. You can install it in two minutes, customize it in an afternoon, and start getting value the same day. The trade-off is that it runs locally, doesn't share across teams easily, and burns through usage quotas quickly.

Frontier is for enterprises that need to manage fleets of AI agents across business systems with governance, permissions, and audit trails. It solves the "how do we actually deploy this at scale" problem that Cowork doesn't touch. The trade-off is that most organizations can't access it yet, and when they can, it will likely require meaningful integration work.

They're not competing products — they're solving different layers of the same problem. A company could conceivably use Cowork for individual productivity today while planning a Frontier deployment for enterprise-wide agent management later this year.

The OpenClaw phenomenon proved the demand is real. But the security risks proved that "install it yourself and hope for the best" isn't an enterprise strategy. Cowork Plugins and Frontier represent the first credible answers from companies with the resources and incentive to get security right. The tools are live, limited but functional, and improving fast. The question isn't whether AI agents will change how your team works — it's whether you'll be ready when they do.

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