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AI x Ownership

A running commentary on new developments in artificial intelligence, read through the lens of ownership, governance, and stewardship. Who holds the power shaping all of our futures – and what structures would need to exist for that power to be held well?

Our series on OpenAI

What this is about

The impact of artificial intelligence on human society, culture, and economy is often compared to the industrial revolution – a shift so fundamental that it reorganises not just how we work, but how we live, relate, and make decisions. Every major new development in the field, particularly those pushing toward artificial general intelligence, is increasingly likened to the arrival of nuclear energy: a force of extraordinary potential, for good and for catastrophic harm alike. 

In the face of this potential, the question of ownership – the structuring of power and money – of AI companies becomes ever more prevalent. Who holds power over these companies, and why? What drives decisions in these companies – shareholder value and profit maximization, or a larger purpose? Who benefits from value created and on what basis? 

Science fiction writer Ted Chiang put it with characteristic precision: “Most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism”. It is a provocation worth sitting with. If the ownership structures behind AI reproduce or even strengthen the same dynamics that have already concentrated wealth and power and externalised harm for society and planet, there is little reason to expect a different outcome simply because the technology is more powerful. And the larger AI companies seem to be aware of this. As they are looking for ways to steward and advance this life-changing technology, none of them have settled for a standard corporate ownership structure. Their companies on standard ownership and governance structures as they are looking for ways to steward and advance this life-changing technology.

That is why we created this AI x Ownership blog: a running commentary on new developments in artificial intelligence, read through the lens of ownership, governance, and stewardship. Who holds the power shaping all of our futures – and what structures would need to exist for that power to be held well?

Click on the snippet, you want to read more about.

Date: 20/12/23 

The series examines OpenAI as an intriguing case in the context of steward-ownership. Founded as a nonprofit to ensure AI development would serve the public interest, OpenAI later introduced a hybrid structure – with a nonprofit entity controlling a for-profit arm, capped returns for investors, and no equity for CEO Sam Altman – echoing key principles of steward ownership.

The series explores how fragile this model proved in practice. The leadership crisis of 2023 revealed gaps in governance and accountability. OpenAI's ongoing 2025 restructuring – including the conversion of its for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation, the removal of profit caps, and the introduction of traditional equity – represents significant steps away from its original ideals and from steward ownership principles. Add to that Elon Musk's $97.4 billion takeover bid and the disbanding of the company's AI safety team, and OpenAI is facing not just a governance crisis, but an existential one.

Against this backdrop, the series asks: What remains of OpenAI's original mission safeguards? Is a purpose-first corporate model still viable in the AI arms race? And what does this tell us about the deeper need for new ownership models in technologies that shape our future?

Read here.

Date: 23/02/26 

“OpenClaw, let me know when Person X has sent the solution to problem Y. Book a flight to Rio once Lisa confirms. And renew my passport automatically if a trip is scheduled and it’s about to expire.”

For some early users, this might already be close to reality. Since its release in November 2025, #OpenClaw has attracted significant attention and is widely seen as a major AI milestone. Not because it’s a better chatbot, but because it offers a glimpse of what may come next: personal, proactive assistants deeply integrated into our digital lives. As Forbes put it, we’re moving from “talking bots” to “do-stuff” agents.

On February, 14, 2026, Austrian founder Peter Steinberger announced on his blog that he would be joining OpenAI: “What I want is to change the world, not build a large company […] and teaming up with #OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.” The announcement followed shortly after OpenAI launched Frontier, its platform for building and managing AI agents.

Naturally, this raises questions about OpenClaw’s future. According to Steinberger, the project will remain open source and continue within a foundation and “that the community should remain central.” The foundation will be (financially?) supported by OpenAI, as Sam Altman added.

That sounds promising. But a foundation and a pledge to remain open source, on their own, do not automatically guarantee long-term independence.

First, it majorly depends on how the foundation, control and incentives around OpenClaw is structured. Experience shows that a long-term independent and community-driven governance needs to be carefully designed around a project’s long-term goals and taking into account how both the hard and soft power of money actually play out in practice. This may matter even more in the fiercely competitive, capital-intensive, and socially consequential AI landscape, where OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, and Google are racing ahead at full speed.

Whether a foundation can become a lasting safeguard will therefore depend on how the structure is designed, funded, and lived day to day – especially considering how prominent of a role OpenAI ultimately plays.

And then, of course, there’s the bigger picture.

Once again, a European-born innovation (or at least its founder, with the foundation’s future base still unclear) is moving into the US ecosystem. This matters because already today much of Europe’s digital infrastructure and public market ownership is concentrated in the US – and there, in the hands of a few tech giants and institutional investors.

For these reasons, OpenClaw is definitely a case worth watching.

And perhaps Peter Steinberger might take some inspiration from steward-ownership in shaping OpenClaw’s future … and from the efforts of Ecosia and Qwant want in advancing European digital sovereignty. We’re here for it.

 

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