Thoughts on Tech News of Note - 02-20-2026

• OpenAI Gets Its Claws on OpenClaw
• Ring Cancels Its Contract with Flock Safety
• Meta Facial Detection and Watch Aspirations

Next week is Samsung Unpacked and as I am a bit of a Samsung junkie, you can expect that at least one story next week won't be about AI. But until then, the AI stories just keep rolling in and there are often interesting angles people have taken on them. So, let's dive in.

OpenAI Gets Its Claws on OpenClaw
For some reason, I was surprised when it was announced that OpenAI was hiring Peter Steinberger to be their in-house AI agent expert. I think I was surprised primarily because I did not think Steinberger was looking for an exit. In one of the interviews I watched about OpenClaw's rapid rise to relevance, he did seem a bit overwhelmed by the attention he'd been receiving. But I knew he'd sold his previous company and had accrued quite a bit of wealth from that exchange, so I didn't think that money would draw him to work for any other company when he could just work for himself. And with OpenClaw being an open-source project, it didn't seem ripe for rabid capitalists to sweep in and devour it. But having read a bit more about where he was with the $10K+ per month expense that was surely going to grow with no real route to recoupment, an exit of some sort does seem like a logical approach. OpenClaw will now belong to an open-source foundation that OpenAI will support. OpenClaw gets to remain open source as Steinberger wanted, and he isn't responsible for the expense of maintaining it anymore. OpenAI intends to use OpenClaw as a foundation for their agentic platform and they perhaps wisely determined that having the man that created it would be a good choice to oversee that work.

Much as I expected, Steinberger didn't really want or intend to start up a new company. As he outlines in his blog post on the career change (https://steipete.me/posts/2026/openclaw), he'd already been there and done that and didn't want to do it again. He'd recently drawn unwanted legal attention from Anthropic over the original ClawdBot name and had proactively reached out to OpenAI to ensure he'd have no drama with the OpenClaw name. Navigating legal waters can be tricky and trying on your own and he undoubtedly knew there would be other challenges yet unfaced. But he did want OpenClaw to continue to grow and evolve and as different founders and CEOs knocked on his door - he was supposedly courted by Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Satya Nadella of Microsoft at a minimum- he knew there would be more safety and support within a larger organization readily able to take on a variety of corporate challenges and shenanigans.

The question I still have after reading the writings and analyzing the analysis is whether Steinberger can achieve both his goals and OpenAI's at the same time. Steinberger has said that he wants to be able to launch an agentic platform easy enough for his mother to use. And we know OpenAI is looking for any and all opportunities to increase revenue so they can stay alive for another day. We know that from a consumer perspective, OpenClaw has been very appealing, even to some regular people, who have run out and bought Mac Minis just so they can run the agent on a clean system with theoretically limited access to personal information. The idea of an AI tool that can not only answer your questions and search the web, but organize your file system, order your groceries, and call restaurants to book reservations is just too tempting for many to pass up even when directly warned against using it by cybersecurity experts. There will be security and privacy challenges to overcome, much less UI and usability hurdles. A skills portal similar to what exists for Amazon's Alexa (but much more organized and useful) might be a good start; users could be encouraged to install certain skills to give the agent access to new sets of information. This would help address the control and access issue that today requires gatekeeping the agent on a separate machine. Accessing OpenClaw via chat apps is smart because of the familiarity, but it might end up being easier to create a separate app for people to run on their phones so it's less likely that unfortunate things happen like spamming your iMessage contacts or accidentally adding people to chats that weren't meant to be there. And eventually some level of access to phones will become desired and needed to accomplish some tasks. This might be niche and weird, but I would like it very much if something could come along, test my hearing and listening preferences and then go update all the audio apps on my phone with an EQ preset or profile that is best for me. I hate that every single audio product has its own app and using a universal EQ app like SpotEQ (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leanderoid.spoteq_15equalizerbands&hl=en_US) - which I love and recommend highly but have no affiliations with them - isn't always the best answer because every audio product has its own signature sound and it doesn't always meld nicely with my universal profile. Anyway, that will never happen but I'm sure there are other scenarios where the phone would be the ideal platform where certain things happen and not just the web or PC.

Meta Facial Detection and Watch Aspirations
I wrote not long ago about how many people would like the ability to easily access names of people they have met before but have forgotten their names. I suggested it might be very useful for places like conferences and other professional gatherings where the glasses you're wearing or maybe the pin on your lapel could tell you the name of the person approaching you who clearly knows who you are and has flawlessly, despite meeting you only once, somehow remembered your first and last name. It's always the person whose name is nowhere near the tip of your tongue or the top of your head. If a device could help reduce the embarrassment of forgetting someone's name without increasing the embarrassment of having some odd and obvious device attached to your person, there would be a market for that. I couldn't say how big the market might be, but I do know that forgetting names is something common enough that even Apple highlighted it in their commercials about the fake new Siri. Surely they are working on that for the real new Siri. It's an obvious use case and Meta will probably market their code-named project "Name Tag" that way as well. But we citizens of the internet know that Meta isn't known for being the most trustworthy company and the data they already have has been used in ways that have led them to court over and over.

Meta has suggested two primary use cases for facial recognition on their smart glasses. One is by identifying people you know because you've identified them or are connected to them via one of Meta's applications. If you are in the habit of regularly photographing, tagging, or connecting with people whose names you are likely to forget, then this could be a useful feature. For me, it would be more useful to have this feature tied to LinkedIn than Facebook or Instagram, but I'm also not much of an Instagram user and I'm not a Facebook user at all. Nevertheless, Meta is thinking about me with their second use case. Here, they can identify faces of people on Meta properties who are not connected to me. While this would arguably be immensely more useful, it's also immensely more intrusive. Meta suggests it could surface a person's public bio and information on their posts, so you know exactly what kind of person you're facing.

In a way, that seems a lot like Ring's Search Party Super Bowl commercial highlighting their ability to find lost dogs, Meta originally wanted to introduce this feature by allowing blind people attending a conference for, perhaps obviously, other blind people. The idea was that the glasses would allow them to easily identify each other, no messy introductions or struggles with voice identification. This is a noble gesture, yes? It seems almost heartwarming at the surface, just like the idea of finding a young girl's lost dog. Let's help the blind. What kind of terrible person wouldn't want to help the blind?

Meta says they have no intention of allowing people to identify any random stranger they encounter, but I am unsure how this would work in practice. If the software has the ability to surface anyone with a Meta account that has a photo and name, then it seems there would be the ability to supply this information whenever anyone encounters an eligible human being possessing a Meta account. What guardrails would they attempt to place around this functionality? How do you determine when a "safe" scenario has arisen to identify a stranger? Would there be any ability for people to opt out/opt in? Will faces of those under a certain age be off limits? What about personal vs. company/public profiles? And what happens when it misidentifies someone?

As for the smartwatch, I'm not sure what features Meta could add beyond the features already available on their neural band that can be used to control the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. Adding health and fitness features to a watch do not guarantee success, especially among those who are very serious about their health data and value accuracy even above features. After all, what good is sleep tracking or exercise detection if the heart rate data is garbage? There doesn't seem to be much incentive for having a fitness/health tracker that can feed into the Meta ecosystem. And even if Meta feeds their data into other ecosystems such as Apple Health, Health Connect, Polar, Garmin, Strava, etc., it's still just another watch that can sync up with other platforms. Without a compelling differentiator such as fashion/design (Meta admittedly does have partnerships of this sort for their glasses, so it isn't out of the question) or some other new use case that doesn't exist on any other smartwatch platform, I'm not sure the world will beat down Meta's door for their new watch.

Yeah, people already know what time it is.

Ring Cancels Its Contract with Flock Safety
Perhaps it's because Ring had already dealt with PR problems in the past, but I was somewhat taken aback by the reaction to Ring's Search Party commercial. After all, people love dogs. I know quite a few dog owners, and they are Very Serious about their dogs. As a person who has never had a pet, this is one of those things where I just have to go on what I see and hear from others, but I do know that I don't like losing anything, even small stupid stuff I can't find around the house, so the dread and dismay of losing a pet seems potentially devastating. And so I expected on some level that that dread of loss would elevate the feature to a higher level of acceptance from the general population. I did not expect that people would immediately make the connections to mass public surveillance. But at the time, I also did not think about the stupid timeline in which we live where almost everything is terrible and even good things are probably also terrible if you look at them closely enough. People looked at this closely enough. And good for them because this was a feature that caused me to raise an eyebrow when it was first reported among tech news outlets some time ago. I immediately made the surveillance connection, too. I already knew Ring camera footage was being used by police forces to "solve crimes". But as a person with Ring cameras, I also know sometimes having the footage is useful. A person attempted to enter my home and due to the footage, we were able to identify the person, a person who it turns out has some mental issues and probably wasn't in his right mind when he made the attempt. We've also had cars on our street hit by other cars, and we've been asked for footage to help determine what happened. I almost always know when packages are being delivered because Ring will let me know, assuming the delivery person isn't actively trying not to be caught on camera. It seems sometimes even delivery people want their privacy.

Flock Safety is a surveillance company that supplies software tools for government, law enforcement, schools, and private entities such as Homeowners Associations (HOAs) to deter and/or solve crimes. Their big hit products are cameras that can read license plates, detect vehicle makes/models, identify gun shots, and alert of car crashes. It's a private company that has been around for nearly ten years. Their existence depends on surveillance, and their core audience consists of groups that many members of our society believe already pose a threat to civil liberties. Forget about law enforcement. When was the last time you saw a positive article about HOAs?

Jamie Siminoff, founder and leader of Ring, seems very focused on his goal of reducing, if not eliminating crime. I do not expect this temporary setback to result in any long-lasting changes. He is Very Serious about pushing the boundaries when it comes to addressing crime via surveillance and I expect this contract to resurface someday, or maybe Ring will enter into a similar contract with another company currently flying under the radar today. Or perhaps he will just create competing products himself under a new line and do the integration internally. This isn't going away. He's just biding his time. And he probably won't do a Super Bowl commercial next time, so stay alert.

Many science fiction novels and history itself tells us we are willing to give up a lot for the appearance of peace and safety, especially when the world seems far from peaceful or safe. Don't fall for the peace and safety ploy. There can be no real peace when you've sacrificed your civil liberties and there can be no real safety when you've merely pushed danger underground.