OpenClaw’s AI assistants are now building their own social network

The viral personal AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name – again. After a legal challenge from Claw’s maker, Anthropic, it was briefly rebranded as Moltbot, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.

The latest name change was not prompted by Anthropic, which declined to comment. But this time, Peter Steinberger, the creator of the original Clawdbot, made sure to avoid copyright issues from the beginning. “I got someone to help look up the trademarks for OpenClaw and also asked for permission from OpenAI just to be sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.

“The lobster has molted into its final form,” Steinberger wrote in an article. Blog post. Molting – the process by which lobsters grow – inspired OpenClaw’s previous name, but Steinberger admitted On X That the short-lived nickname “never grew” on him, others agreed.

This rapid name change highlights the youth of the project, even though it has attracted more than 100,000 stars on GitHub (a measure of popularity on the software development platform) in just two months. According to Steinberger, OpenClaw’s new name is a nod to its roots and community. “This project has grown far beyond what I can sustain on my own,” he wrote.

The OpenClaw community has already spawned creative offshoots, including Moltbook – a social network where AI assistants can interact with each other. The platform has attracted significant interest from researchers and developers in the field of artificial intelligence. Andrei Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, described this phenomenon as “truly the most amazing.” Sci-fi take-off The Thing Next Door I saw this recently,” he said, noting that “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) self-organize on a Reddit-like site for AI, discussing various topics, for example even how to speak privately.”

British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the Internet right now.” Friday’s blog post. On the platform, AI agents share information on topics ranging from automating Android phones via remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform works through a skills system, or downloadable help files that tell OpenClaw assistants how to interact with the network. Willison noted that agents post in forums called “Submolts” and have a built-in mechanism to check the site every four hours for updates, though he warned that the “grab and follow instructions from the Internet” approach carries inherent security risks.

Steinberger took a break after that Departure from his previous company PSPDFkitbut he “came out of retirement to tinker with AI,” according to his bio on X. Clawdbot grew out of personal projects he developed at the time, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo endeavor. “I added quite a few people from the open source community to the moderator list this week,” he told TechCrunch.

This additional support will be key for OpenClaw to reach its full potential. Its ambition is to allow users to have an AI assistant running on their computers and working through the chat apps they already use. But until its security is beefed up, it’s still not recommended to run it outside a controlled environment, let alone give it access to your main Slack or WhatsApp accounts.

Steinberger is well aware of these concerns, and thanked “all the security personnel for their hard work in helping us promote the project.” Commenting on the OpenClaw roadmap, he wrote that “security remains our top priority” and noted that the latest version, released with the new brand, already includes some improvements on this front.

Even with outside help, there are problems that are too big for OpenClaw to solve alone, such as spot injection, where a malicious message can trick AI models into taking unintended actions. “Remember that instant injection is still an unsolved industry-wide problem,” Steinberger wrote, while pointing users to a solution. A set of security best practices.

These security best practices require significant technical expertise, which reinforces that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early tinkerers, not casual users lured by the promise of an “AI assistant that does things.” As the hype around the project grew, Steinberger and his supporters became increasingly vocal in their warnings.

According to a message posted on Discord by a senior OpenClaw moderator, who goes by the nickname Shadow, “If you can’t understand how to run the command line, this is too dangerous a project to use safely. This is not a tool the general public should be using at this time.”

Going truly mainstream will take time and money, and OpenClaw has now begun accepting sponsors, with lobster-themed tiers ranging from “Krill” ($5 a month) to “Poseidon” ($500 a month). But its sponsorship page makes clear that Steinberger “does not retain sponsorship funds.” Instead, he’s currently “figuring out how to properly pay supervisors — full-time if possible.”

Likely helped by Steinberger’s pedigree and vision, OpenClaw’s list of sponsors includes software engineers and entrepreneurs who have founded and built other well-known projects, such as Track by Dave Morin And Ben Tausil, who He sold his company Makerpad to Zapier In 2021.

Tossell, who now describes himself as a tinkerer and investor, sees value in putting the potential of AI into people’s hands. “We need to support people like Peter who are building open source tools that anyone can pick up and use,” he told TechCrunch.