Google is building its own OpenClaw alternative — Remy ‘elevates the Gemini app into a true assistant’

Google is reportedly building its own OpenClaw alternative as the tech giant continues its rapid-fire agentic AI push.

According to reports from Business Insider, the OpenClaw-style agent, dubbed “Remy”, is being tested internally at the firm through a staff-only version of the Gemini app.

Sources told the publication the agent will also be integrated with a host of Google services.

"Remy is your 24/7 personal agent for work, school, and daily life, powered by Gemini," internal documents state.

"It elevates the Gemini app into a true assistant that can take actions on your behalf — not just answer questions or generate content."

Development of the agent comes amid sharp interest in OpenClaw since the beginning of the year. The open source agent, which is designed to run locally on devices, allows users to create their own custom agents which can carry out tasks and take actions on their behalf.

Google has sharpened its focus on agents and orchestration in recent months. As ITPro reported at Google Cloud Next last month, the firm expanded its Gemini Enterprise offering, with an eye on enabling customers to manage agents more efficiently.

That expansion saw the launch of Agent Runtime, a platform designed specifically for agent orchestration.

At present, Google doesn’t have an outright alternative to OpenClaw, and materials shared with Business Insider suggest Remy could fill in this gap.

“Deeply integrated across Google, Remy can monitor for things that matter to you, handle complex tasks proactively, and learn your preferences over time,” an internal description states.

Exact details on a release timeline are yet to be revealed, and sources told the publication that Remy is currently in a “dogfooding” stage. This refers to a practice whereby tech companies use their own products internally to test and fine-tune them before public release.

Google is currently preparing for its annual I/O conference, which is set to take place between 19 and 20 May.

Here, the tech giant could offer customers a preview of the Remy product, and as ITPro reported last week, speculation has been mounting over a raft of potential new product launches - with Gemini 4 chief among them.

Remy-ready models

Rory Bathgate

A Google alternative to OpenClaw would be a complete no-brainer for the hyperscaler, which is slowly succeeding in raising public awareness of its Gemini offerings to the same level as ChatGPT.

OpenClaw became a hit earlier this year, with AI enthusiasts drawn in by the appeal of an on-device, personalized AI assistant.

Google has been working especially hard in the past two years to make inference cost-effective. This is the bread and butter of enterprise agentic AI, as it only makes sense to run an agent around the clock if the cost of doing so isn’t ruinously high.

Google Cloud has already provided a lot of the innovation needed to keep costs low for cloud agents via TPU 8i, its new inference-optimized tensor processing unit (TPU).

For on-device processing, Google DeepMind is focused on deployment of Gemma 4, the latest iteration in its open source Gemma model family. If I had to guess, this will be the default model for Remy as and when it arrives, to deliver the same open source, on-device functionality that originally made OpenClaw famous.

In just the past 24 hours, Google DeepMind announced a major latency improvement for Gemma 4, via the introduction of multi-token prediction (MTP) drafters. These are tiny, specialized LLMs that help Gemma 4 to ‘predict’ multiple output tokens at once to reduce response times.

Google DeepMind claimed that on an Apple M4, this improved Gemma 4 31B token-per-second up to 2.5x. It’s significant that, in addition to pixel TPUs and Nvidia GPUs, Google DeepMind specifically draws focus to Apple silicon, given that the M4 Mac Mini is one of the most popular devices to run OpenClaw.

For me, this is a clear signal that something like Remy is in the works.

OpenClaw also allows users to connect cloud models to their messaging platform of choice via API calls, and to this end I’d expect Remy to also connect to Gemini 3.1 Flash – or Gemini 4 models, as the case may be – for more ‘powerful’ use cases.

Here, TPU 8i could come in handy, particularly if Google Cloud begins to offer Remy functionality at the enterprise scale.

If Google pulls this off, it will be another major corner of the AI market that it’s managed to corner.

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