Two AI assistants just launched claiming they can actually run your computer, so I spent a week testing OpenClaw vs Claude Co-work and—surprise—the real story is security. OpenClaw is the open-source monster with 180,000 GitHub stars. It runs on your own machine, connects to 50+ services (WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, email, calendar, browser automation, Spotify, GitHub, smart home… the whole kitchen sink), and you can pick your model (Claude, GPT, even local via Ollama). It’s “free” under MIT, but your real bill is API usage—usually $5–$50/month—plus whatever hardware you dedicate to it. Claude Co-work is Anthropic’s January 2026 answer, living inside the Claude desktop app on macOS. It works with your local files through a sandboxed folder system, asks before acting, and keeps the attack surface way smaller. It’s also not cheap: $20/month Pro, and power users report hitting usage caps fast—so you’re staring at $100–$200/month on Max if you actually use it. Here’s the part nobody wants on the marketing page: OpenClaw got torched in the wild. Microsoft and Cisco publicly warned against running it on standard machines. Kaspersky found 512 vulnerabilities in a single audit, there were 300+ malicious marketplace skills, and 30,000 exposed instances leaking credentials. My verdict: if you’re technical and can harden your setup, OpenClaw is more powerful. If you want safe-ish out of the box without becoming your own security team, Co-work is the smarter pick for most people.