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Five days. That’s really all it takes for Clawdbot — and him Open source artificial intelligence assistant This promises to do actual things on your computer, not just chat – to go viral, collapse, rebrand (twice!) and emerge as OpenClaw. Bruised but still breathing like a cuddly crustacean.
If you’ve blinked over the past few days, you may have missed the cryptocurrency scammers hijacking Oh, and somewhere in the chaos, AI developer Anthropic sent a polite email asking them to change the name, for the love of branding.
Welcome to OpenClaw. Formerly known as Clawdbot and briefly known as Moltbot, it’s the same AI assistant under a newer, sturdier shell. And boy, does this lobster have a tradition.
What is OpenClaw? And why should you care?
Here’s the pitch that made Tech X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) lose its mind: Imagine an AI assistant that doesn’t just chat; He – she He does things. Real things. On your computer. Through the applications you use.
OpenClaw lives where you actually communicate, like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack, Discord, Signal – you name it. You can text it like you would text a friend, and it remembers your conversations from weeks ago and can send you proactive reminders. And if you give it permission, it can automate tasks, run commands, and essentially act as a digital personal assistant that never sleeps. Unlike its founder.
OpenClaw was created by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer who sold his company PSPDFKit for about $119 million and then got bored enough to build this, and OpenClaw represents what a lot of people thought Siri It should have been all along. Not a voice-activated party trick, but an actual assistant that learns, remembers, and gets things done. (CNET has reached out to Steinberger for comment on this story.)
OpenClaw does not require any specific hardware to run, though Mac mini It seems popular. The basic idea is that OpenClaw itself mostly routes messages to AI companies’ servers and calls APIs, and the AI-intensive work is done on whatever LLM you choose: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini.
Devices The conversation only gets bigger if you want to run large local models or do heavy automation. This is where the powerful machines are located, e.g Mac miniare often inserted into conversation. But this is not a condition.
The project was launched about three weeks ago and achieved 9,000 stars on GitHub within 24 hours. By the time the dust settled late last week, it had surpassed 60,000 stars, with all of its AI researchers counting. Andrei Karpathy To the Investor (and the White House AI and Crypto Czar) David Sacks He sings his praises. Mac Stories He called it “the future of personal AI assistants.”
Then things got weird.
The rename that broke the Internet (twice)
Ostensibly, last weekend, Anthropic slid into Steinberger incoming mail To point out that “Clawd” (the helper’s name) and “Clawdbot” (the project’s name) were probably somewhat similar to its AI, Claude.
“As a trademark owner, we have an obligation to protect our marks — so we reached out directly to the creator of Clawdbot about this matter,” a representative from Anthropic said in an email statement to CNET.
by At 3:38 a.m. EST on Tuesday, On January 27, Steinberger made his call: “@Moltbot it is.”
What happened next, according to Steinberger’s posts on
Within seconds – literally, seconds – the automated bots clipped @clawdbot’s handle. The squatter immediately posted his cryptocurrency wallet address. Meanwhile, in a sleep-deprived panic, Steinberger accidentally renamed his personal GitHub account instead of the organization’s account. The robots caught Steipete before he could even blink an eye. He said both crises required him to contact contacts at X and GitHub to make fixes.
Then there was what the creators called the “Multi Handsome Incident.” Steinberger instructed Molty (the artificial intelligence) to redesign his icon. In one memorable attempt to make the mascot look “five years older,” the AI created the face of a human man grafted onto the body of a lobster. The Internet has turned it into a meme (a la Squidward is handsome) within minutes.
Fake profiles claiming to be “Head of Engineering at Clawdbot” promote crypto plans. The fake CLAWD cryptocurrency briefly arrived $16 million market value Before it collapses by more than 90%. “Any project that lists me as the owner of the coin is a scam.” Steinberger posted on Xangrily, to thousands of increasingly confused followers.
To continue the chaotic saga that has unfolded over the past week, as of January 30, the project has settled on renaming Moltbot to OpenClaw, bringing in “Open” for open source and “Claw” for its lobster heritage. The name change makes sense because of these considerations. However, the reason is actually much simpler: Steinberger didn’t like the name.
What made this AI tool go viral?
Strip away the clutter, and OpenClaw becomes truly impressive.
most Artificial intelligence tools It’s basically the same thing. You can open a website, type a question or query, wait for it to be generated, copy the answer, paste it elsewhere, and so on. OpenClaw wants to flip this script by having the assistant inside your existing conversations. You’re already on WhatsApp or iMessage, so why not send a text message as if you were texting a coworker?
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Killer features? Well, there are three main things.
For one thing, he’s persistent memory. OpenClaw doesn’t forget everything when you close the application. It learns your preferences, keeps track of ongoing projects and actually remembers that conversation you had last Tuesday.
There are also proactive notifications. It can message you first when there’s something important, such as daily briefings, deadline reminders, and email triage summaries. You can wake up to a text message that says, “Here are your three priorities today,” without having to ask the AI first.
Finally, there is true automation. Depending on your setup, it can schedule tasks, fill out forms, organize files, search your email, create reports, and control smart home devices. People have reported using it for everything from clearing out inboxes to days-long search strings, and from habit tracking to automated weekly summaries of what they’ve shipped. The use cases seem to keep growing because once you connect them to your actual tools (calendar, notes, email), they stop feeling like software and just become part of your routine.
Do you really have to use this thing?
It’s time for the real talk. OpenClaw is not a polished, enterprise-ready product with vendor support and compliance paperwork – and it is Something Steinberger acknowledges. It’s a fast-moving, open-source project that has just survived a near-death experience involving trademark lawyers, cryptocurrency scammers, and disastrously exposed databases. Whew.
So, amid all the hype, you’re probably wondering if OpenClaw is something you should actually try. Sure enough, this tool remembers information over the weeks, works between applications and systems and provides proactive notifications. But it has rough edges. This is not a tool for you if you need something that “just works” and doesn’t involve complicated installation steps.
And you probably don’t want to do this if you don’t want to think about cybersecurity – and don’t understand it deeply.
Key security risks to note
Security experts have raised red flags about OpenClaw’s safety as its popularity grows. Because the agent is designed to run locally and interact with emails, files, and credentials, even small setup errors can have big consequences.
In recent days, Researchers monitored Many OpenClaw deployments are publicly accessible with little or no authentication, exposing API keys, chat logs, and system access to anyone who finds them.
Some of the most obvious security concerns were social rather than technical, including fake Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw downloads and hijacked accounts used to spread malware or scams. While developers have moved quickly to patch certain flaws, security analysts say OpenClaw’s troubled debut highlights a larger problem facing AI agents: As they become more autonomous and more powerful, security risks are also growing just as quickly.
Roy Ackerman, Head of Cloud and Identity Security at Silverfortan identity security platform, said in an email to CNET that the danger of a tool like OpenClaw is not that it is clearly malicious. What is dangerous is that they continue to act under a legitimate human identity, potentially blurring the lines between the user and the device acting on their behalf.
“When an AI agent continues to operate using a human’s credentials, after a human logs out, it becomes a hybrid identity that most security controls are not designed to recognize or control,” Ackerman said. “Organizations should not try to block these tools outright, but they need to change their stance, treating autonomous agents as identities, limiting their privileges and constantly monitoring behavior, not just logins.”
Little crayfish that molted (and persisted)
“Multating is what lobsters do to grow,” according to Steinberger. They’ve shed their old shell and gone bigger: from Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw.
OpenClaw is the same software as Clawdbot, offering the same great architecture and vision of what personal AI assistants could be. But the past 120 hours have forced her to grow quickly, deal with security vulnerabilities, struggle with authentication, and learn that viral success attracts not just users, but scammers, squatters, and intellectual property lawyers.
Through it all, OpenClaw is still standing. Sedition Still buzzing. GitHub’s stars continue to rise. And somewhere in Vienna (or perhaps London), Peter Steinberger is probably still fending off DMs from people asking him if he’s launching a cryptocurrency token. (It’s not. Please stop asking.)
Want to try OpenClaw for yourself? Head to openclaw.ai For documentation, installation guides, and most importantly, a security checklist.
Just maybe use a spare laptop. And definitely don’t name your project after anyone’s trademarked AI model. This turned out to be important.