Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the AI agent OpenClaw that Sam Altman spent billions on: It cannot be trusted because...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has a clear verdict on OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that took the internet by storm earlier this year and that OpenAI reportedly paid anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion to acquire—along with its creator, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger—in one of the most-talked-about acquihires in recent AI history.

Benioff was intrigued enough to buy a separate machine just to run it. But after trying it, his conclusion is blunt: powerful as it is, OpenClaw is not built for the enterprise. The problem, he says, comes down to one word: trust."OpenClaw is great. But it's not enterprise-great," Benioff said. "What's missing is trust, security, reliability, and availability."

The problem isn't the hype—it's the gaps

Benioff's comments reflect a tension that has followed OpenClaw since it went viral earlier this year.

The project, built by Steinberger, exploded onto the scene in late 2025, racking up over 100,000 GitHub stars in weeks and drawing millions of visitors. It promised an AI that doesn't just answer questions—it books flights, manages calendars, and runs autonomously across your entire machine.Security researchers weren't as impressed. Cisco flagged that OpenClaw could run shell commands, leak API keys, and execute scripts with minimal safeguards.

Bitsight found over 30,000 exposed instances on the open internet within days of the tool going viral. The product documentation itself warned: "There is no 'perfectly secure' setup."

Salesforce wants a different kind of agent

Rather than adopt OpenClaw, Benioff said Salesforce is building its own stack. "We need local agents, customer agents, employee agents—the whole stack working together," he said, pointing to deep integration across Slack and its broader suite of applications.That vision mirrors what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called out at GTC 2026, where he unveiled NemoClaw, an enterprise-grade version of OpenClaw with security guardrails baked in. "For the CEOs, the question is: what's your OpenClaw strategy?" Huang said on stage.OpenClaw's creator, meanwhile, framed his move to OpenAI as a way to build something his mother could use—a shift from hacker-friendly to broadly accessible. Sam Altman confirmed the hire, saying Steinberger would "drive the next generation of personal agents," with OpenClaw moving to a foundation and remaining open source.For Benioff, none of that changes the calculus today. A tool good enough to warrant buying a dedicated machine is not, in his view, good enough for enterprise deployment—and Salesforce is building what it thinks the gap requires.