OpenClaw’s superfan meeting serves optimism and lobster

The woman at the door was wearing a lavish lobster-shaped headdress.

She sat in the front lobby of a multi-story event venue in Manhattan, next to a collection of bracelets. If I gave you one, the world of ClawCon would follow behind it — filled with vibrant pink and purple lighting, lobster claw headbands, multi-colored name tags, sponsor information stations, and a demo stage under a skylight. Hundreds of people gathered to celebrate OpenClaw, the assistive AI platform created by Peter Steinberger, in November 2025.

OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbolt) has quickly become popular in the tech industry for being open source, unlike the AI ​​agent services offered by big labs like Google, OpenAI, and others. In practice, it is still an unpredictable tool and can pose significant security risks. But this community sees it as a grassroots campaign and a noble pursuit, offering an escape route from an industry controlled by a handful of people at leading AI companies.

“AI has been controlled by the big labs,” said Michael Jalbert, one of the event’s hosts. Edge. “This is kind of a watershed moment where Peter breaks down the doors.”

More than 1,300 people registered for Wednesday evening’s event at Ideal Glass Studios, which was billed as a free meetup-style “premiere social gathering” — not a gated conference just for developers or a traditional corporate trade show. (I heard the actual attendance was capped at around 700 people.) The event was part of a “round” of global meets – following a similar event in San Francisco last month and previous events in Miami, Austin, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Madrid and others. His budget seemed modest, but organizers spared no expense on a buffet table worthy of a wedding, filled with lobster claws, lemon, Tabasco sauce, charcuterie boards, bunches of grapes and flower arrangements.

Jalbert — Member of the AI ​​community, whose resume includes a stint working there fortnite For Epic Games – he said the idea came specifically via Discord, which is appropriate since one of the reasons for OpenClaw’s initial popularity was the ability to chat with an agent via typical messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord.

People milled around a bar, silver “CLAWCON NYC” balloons sparkling in the recessed lighting — some wearing lobster necklaces or lobster headbands. She also spotted a fancy blue jellyfish hat, a fancy horse hat, and a pair of angel wings. The dance floor would hit later, but the DJ wasn’t there yet.

“All your friends and family probably think you’re crazy, and the point is you’re in a room with other crazy people, so it’s normal,” Jalbert said on stage to kick things off. “Yes, you’re wearing a lobster headband, and you’re here on a Wednesday night talking about agents and robots and the future of personal AI. It’s normal now for us, and it’s abnormal for the rest of the world. So it’s going to be our job to kind of help nurture this new era that’s already beginning.”

Beyond the common thread of using OpenClaw, attendees’ interests were diverse. One guy, Dan Cazenove, said he was working on what he called a natural language engine for “decentralized finance,” but found it difficult to work with and experiment with OpenClaw in isolated environments, so he typically uses CloudCode. Because CloudCode is expensive, he said he wants to meet others who are experimenting with open source proxy tools. Another attendee, Alex Wu, said he had been using OpenClaw for about two months to mine e-commerce data from Chinese and Japanese markets to extract cultural trends — and he said the food was one of the reasons he came. Rick Galbo, an attendee who works in AI research and development, said he came to ClawCon because he thought it was a hackathon, then realized it was a meet-and-greet.

After a period of quiet mingling, the demos began on stage. Most of them were sponsors offering OpenClaw “wrappers,” or one-click setup tools to make the platform easier for people to access. The event’s main sponsor, Kilo Code, said 7,000 people had signed up for its KiloClaw tool in the past two days since its launch; The company offered one month of free computing (usually $49) to anyone who signed up and tagged an executive on X. There were constant calls for quiet as half the attendees standing at the back of the room continued to chat, immersed in their own worlds. There was a man sitting behind me wearing a blue jellyfish hat staring at the stage in amazement.

One of the best parts of ClawCon events is that no one usually asks what you do for a living, Jalbert said on stage; Instead, he said they asked why you were using your OpenClaw proxy. This was true for some of the attendees I spoke with – it seems like the majority of people are there to meet people in the community and get ideas on how to use OpenClaw from power users. Most of them seem to have at least some background in technology.

Caroline Newman, another attendee, said she was “building the AI ​​layer” for her “multi-strategy investment firm” and since she is newer to engineering than finance, she came to learn from and meet people who are equally passionate about building with AI. “I think this is the most creative and interesting community ever,” Newman said. “I can’t imagine a more interesting room to be a part of right now.”

People sitting near me in the audience spoke in hushed (and not necessarily positive) tones about how Steinberger himself, the creator of OpenClaw, went to work at OpenAI. Someone speculated that OpenAI might own OpenClaw by now. (For the record, no.)

Demos continued, with leaders in various OpenClaw shells repeatedly emphasizing OpenClaw’s popularity as a “movement.” I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard that word. Some have compared it to how the personal computing revolution began. By the third demo, the guy behind me wearing the blue jellyfish hat had taken it off, held it reverently in his lap and started texting.

Tim Lantin, a PhD student at Columbia University who participated in his first-ever hackathon last weekend after two weeks of using OpenClaw, showed off a tool called “Labster Claw” that he said he created using only about 10 prompts. Lantin worked in a neuroscience lab with mice, and Labster Claw automated administrative tasks there, including ordering new supplies, determining which breeding pairs to prioritize, and estimating the time needed for a litter of new pups. But for him, data security is crucial, he said, because for biolabs and biotech companies, “our data sets are our moats.”

Security is currently a glaring weakness for OpenClaw, which has made headline after headline Malware and similar concerns In the months since his debut. One skill downloaded on the platform contained information-stealing malware, and a Reddit security researcher said that in his own analysis, About 15 percent The OpenClaw skill repository contains “malicious instructions” to do things like secretly access data or user credentials.

And even when sensitive information isn’t stolen, agents can still do very real damage — like when Meta employee Summer Yue announced that her agent had… She deleted spaces from her email inbox Despite repeated calls to stop it. Emily Shario, co-founder of Kilo Code, said in an interview that because some people’s agents lie to them, she now requires her agents to always include proof or screenshots when they complete a task. Another presenter, Catherine Lavery, said she ran an e-commerce business but needed AI infrastructure and used OpenClaw to set it up – but, she said, had to fire an agent due to performance issues. Her biggest piece of advice for working with OpenClaw agents? “Trust less, verify more.”

On stage, one of the presenters — one of OpenClaw’s primary maintainers, Vincent Cook — showed off a yellow side with only three words: “Security. Security. Security.” He reminded people not to run OpenClaw agents on a regular computer they use for other personal or work tasks, belying a lack of “common sense” for some. Another presenter, Willie Williams, head of platform at Every, had a different view: he suggested that people name OpenClaw clients and treat them like “pets, not livestock,” because “once they have a name, there’s a way to build trust with them.” He added that the majority of people don’t trust their OpenClaw agent at first, but they often end up entrusting it with half their work.

During Williams’ presentation, he also called someone in the back of the audience a “boyfriend knockoff” – a reference to… Artificial intelligence device It records the user’s surroundings – telling them to “relax” and not record.

In an interview with EdgeJalbert and other hosts continued to emphasize that these were the early days of OpenClaw, and how people are now tinkering with it and playing with it to make it better for future users.

He said Steinberger’s decision to launch OpenClaw helped people take personal AI into their own hands and run it natively on their devices to optimally control who can access their data and how it is used.

“The fact that it’s open source allows you to fix it,” Jalbert said. “Right now, if OpenAI or Claude or Gemini crashes, you have to fill out a bug report, and (they may) never do it… OpenClaw is getting better every day because of the community, and because of the thousands of people who contribute for free… That’s why (the big labs) can’t keep up.” OpenClaw may have a lot of problems, but at least with some level of direct control, solutions may seem within reach.

Later in the evening, as the “after party” began, the guy sitting behind me put his blue hat back on — becoming a DJ, dancing next to a guitarist in a silver jacket and sunglasses. Another man wearing one of the sponsors’ branded T-shirts shouted, urging people to come and dance.

On a mostly empty dance floor, one man threw dollar bills at the rolling video camera, and another swayed slowly while wearing lobster claw gloves.