In eight weeks, four companies shipped agent runtimes targeting the same architectural pattern. OpenClaw went from 9K to 68K GitHub stars. Perplexity launched Computer. Anthropic launched Dispatch. NVIDIA announced NemoClaw at GTC. Different audiences. Different tradeoffs. Same structural claim: agents need a long-running runtime with containment boundaries, not a chat window. The barrier to deploying an autonomous agent is now lower than the barrier to writing a containment policy for one. Every company needs to treat this as infrastructure, not a trend.















