Meta's $200 agent nobody asked for

OpenClaw arrived the way most things in Silicon Valley now arrive: as a tool that did something slightly alarming, very fast, for a small group of people who could not stop talking about it. The open-source agent — software that hands a large language model the run of a computer, booking the travel and clearing the inbox and, in one case a Meta safety lead documented in February, wiping out hers while ignoring her instructions to stop — has gathered more than 225,000 stars on GitHub and a devoted following on Discord. It is powerful, unruly, and by near-universal agreement far too complicated for anyone not already fluent in the command line. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, reckons that last part is the opportunity.

Meta is building a consumer version of OpenClaw, codenamed Hatch, and according to internal documents reviewed by The Information, a tech-news outlet, it intends to charge for it — as much as $199.99 a month for a premium tier, level with the priciest plans from OpenAI and Anthropic. The pitch to the user is plain language in, working software out: ask for "a fitness tracker" and the agent assembles one, with a dashboard of "skills" (modular add-ons that let it plan a trip or work a website on the user's behalf) doing the rest. The logic is familiar Meta. Take a product that has caught fire among a narrow, technical audience, sand off the parts that frighten ordinary people, and push the result down pipes that already reach billions of phones. The company did exactly this to Snapchat with Stories and to TikTok with Reels, and in both cases distribution beat novelty. That the underlying capability is now close to a commodity is something Meta concedes in the building of it, since Hatch has run on Anthropic's Claude models throughout development and will switch to Meta's own Muse Spark only at launch. The urgency comes from the balance sheet: Meta will spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditure this year, nearly double its 2025 outlay, against revenue that is still almost entirely advertising. Something has to start paying that back.