Apple may eventually build a direct competitor to OpenClaw, an agentic AI system capable of autonomously operating software on behalf of the user, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes.
Writing in his Power On newsletter, Gurman says he expects Apple to develop a system that could fully operate iPhone, iPad, and Mac software on the user's behalf. The prediction comes on the back of comments made by Apple's Siri engineering chief, Mike Rockwell, following last week's WWDC keynote.
Rockwell appeared to leave the door open for Siri to expand beyond its current capabilities, describing the new engine underpinning the assistant as "a completely modern architecture" built with extensibility in mind:
[An agent is] something that is operating on a loop of information coming in, making decisions, and then taking action. And ours is primarily request based today. But the underpinning architecture for Siri is a completely modern architecture, and so our ability to extend in the future is is very similar.
Apple's SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, acknowledged the broader category but was measured in his framing of it, describing the space as experimental and saying that finding the right user experience remains the priority, while stopping short of ruling out Apple's eventual participation.
Apple's upcoming Siri implementation is newly rebuilt on a large language model foundation, and remains a request-based system. Full computer-use agentic functionality of the kind offered by OpenClaw and similar tools from Google and Anthropic would represent a significant expansion beyond what Apple announced last week.
