By Janakiram MSV
Publication Date: 2026-05-23 15:30:00
OpenClaw made the always-on agent feel personal by making it live somewhere you could point at — a Mac mini on a shelf, drawing seven watts, running while you sleep. Peter Steinberger’s open-source project surpassed 300,000 GitHub stars by April and became one of the fastest-growing repositories on GitHub. The whole appeal was ownership: your hardware, your credentials, your lobster.
On Tuesday at I/O, Google launched Gemini Spark, and it makes the opposite bet. Spark is a 24/7 personal agent built on Gemini 3.5 Flash and connected to Google’s Antigravity agent stack. It runs in the background on virtual machines on Google Cloud. You never see the machine. Google plans to let you text and email the agent directly, so it works while your laptop is shut.
The split is about where the agent lives, not what it does
Strip away the branding, and Spark and OpenClaw do roughly the same job. Watch an inbox, draft the status update, browse the web, run the recurring…