OpenClaw arrived on the internet last month like a weather system. Within days of its release under an MIT licence, it had been downloaded millions of times, dissected in thousands of tutorials, and endorsed by Jensen Huang as “definitely the next ChatGPT.”
Its appeal is simple: it is a free, locally running AI agent that can browse the web, write code, manage files, and execute multi-step tasks on your computer without sending everything to a cloud server. It is, in the language of the current moment, agentic, and it is free.
Manus, the AI agent startup that Meta acquired at the end of the last year, launched its response on March 16, 2026. A new desktop application called My Computer is now available to all macOS and Windows users, bringing Manus's agent directly onto users' personal devices.
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Through My Computer, the agent can read, analyse, and edit local files, launch and control applications, and execute multi-step tasks, including coding tasks, without the user having to upload anything to a server.
Manus's previous iteration operated largely in the cloud: you gave it a task, it worked on a remote server, and it returned results. That model has real advantages in terms of compute and consistency, but it has one significant disadvantage relative to OpenClaw: it is not free, and it does not sit on your machine.
My Computer is an attempt to close both gaps, while maintaining what Manus says is a more polished and capable agent underneath.
What My Computer actually does?
According to the company, My Computer allows the Manus agent to organise files, build coding projects, and control applications on the local device, tasks that previously required either technical skill or a cloud upload.
The company cited organising “thousands of internal images” as one example use case. The agent can create applications from within the desktop environment and interact with software already installed on the machine.
The key architectural difference between Manus and OpenClaw is the model layer beneath the agent. OpenClaw is open-source and can be run with a variety of underlying language models; its quality depends heavily on which model the user connects to it and how they configure it.
Manus runs on Meta's own proprietary model stack, which the company says provides a more consistent and capable base, at the cost of a subscription fee.
For users who have found OpenClaw's setup process intimidating or its outputs inconsistent, Manus is pitching itself as the polished commercial alternative: the tool that does the same thing, but works reliably out of the box. For users who want free and configurable, OpenClaw is not going anywhere.
The Manus launch is one piece of a broader pattern at Meta around autonomous AI agents. According to information surfacing from the company's internal development work, Meta AI is preparing to integrate its Avocado model family, the Manus agent capability, and direct OpenClaw compatibility, an acknowledgement that open-source agent frameworks are now infrastructure that any competitive AI product needs to speak to.
The desktop agent market is becoming genuinely competitive. Apple has been extending its on-device intelligence framework; Microsoft is deepening Copilot's integration with the Windows file system; Google is building agentic capabilities into Gemini.
Each of these players has a different structural advantage, hardware, operating system access, search data, that Manus and Meta do not have. What Manus does have is a head start in cross-platform, task-oriented agency, and the resources of the world's largest social network behind it.
Whether users who are comfortable with OpenClaw's configuration complexity will pay for a Manus subscription, and whether users who are not comfortable with it will trust a Meta product running on their local machine, are the questions the market will answer over the coming months.
The AI agent race has moved from the cloud to the desktop. It is still very early, and it is moving very fast.