Why Red Hat is building an open foundation for enterprise agents with OpenClaw Enterprise

Applications are moving beyond predefined workflows toward agentic systems that can reason, use tools, interact with enterprise data, execute code, delegate work and collaborate with other agents to accomplish goals. This has driven the development of new capabilities in areas like agent sandboxing to secure agent execution, AI gateways to secure access to models and tools, AgentOps for tracing, observability, evaluation and more. We believe another important layer of the enterprise AI stack is emerging: an open control plane for agents. This is why we’re excited about contributing to OpenClaw and the newly announced OpenClaw Enterprise, an enterprise-grade control plane for deploying and operating persistent agents across users and teams.

From rapid innovation to enterprise-readiness

OpenClaw has evolved rapidly over the past year, maturing from an agile open-source project into a production-grade foundation for AI agents. That evolution continues with the newly announced OpenClaw Enterprise project, built specifically to securely deploy these agents in enterprise environments.

Red Hat, NVIDIA and others are collaborating on OpenClaw Enterprise development in the open. Both OpenClaw and OpenClaw Enterprise are fully open source, driving both innovation as well as transparency and trust for enterprise AI deployments. 

A proven history with Linux and Kubernetes

Our approach with OpenClaw follows a familiar playbook at Red Hat. Throughout Red Hat's history, some of the biggest changes in enterprise computing have been driven by fundamental shifts in how applications are built and operated. Linux helped enterprises move applications from proprietary Unix systems and specialized hardware onto an open operating system running on industry-standard infrastructure. Later, containers and Kubernetes helped drive another transformation toward cloud-native applications composed of distributed microservices.  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift helped make those transitions possible for many enterprise customers, powered by Red Hat’s extensive work in upstream projects to drive underlying technologies that are open, trusted, and secure. 

Today, AI agents are driving the next evolution of enterprise applications. This is fueling new innovations across the open source ecosystem and projects like OpenShell, vLLM, Pytorch and more that Red Hat is contributing to. Our work in the OpenClaw community and on OpenClaw Enterprise will help bring new agent runtime capabilities and an open agent control plane to the enterprise.

“Enterprises want the flexibility and innovation of open source with the governance, security, and reliability they expect from enterprise software,” said Kevin Lin, who leads OpenClaw Enterprise efforts at OpenAI. “OpenClaw Enterprise brings those pieces together, and working with Red Hat and the broader community will help make it a trusted, open foundation for how agents are managed and deployed in the enterprise.”

Building upstream together

Red Hat recently announced our sponsorship of the OpenClaw Foundation and we are putting engineers behind it. Red Hat engineers are already contributing to OpenClaw, and we're expanding that investment with expertise in Linux, Kubernetes, distributed systems, security and enterprise infrastructure. Building on our internal use of OpenClaw today, we look forward to deploying OpenClaw Enterprise to orchestrate internal agent deployments and help directly inform our upstream contributions. We intend to work with OpenAI, NVIDIA and the broader OpenClaw community on the capabilities required to operate agents at enterprise scale to drive the evolution of this technology and help establish open standards.