This document chronicles thetumultuous five-day journey of OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and brieflyMoltbot), an open-source AI assistant that went viral, faced trademark issues,and survived crypto scams and security challenges. From its initial launch thatgarnered 60,000 GitHub stars to the chaotic rebranding forced by Anthropic'strademark concerns, this story captures the wild ride of a project thatpromised to revolutionize personal AI assistants by integrating them directlyinto everyday communication platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage.

The document exploresOpenClaw's killer features including persistent memory, proactivenotifications, and real automation capabilities that set it apart fromtraditional AI chatbots. It also examines the security concerns that emerged asthe project gained popularity, including exposed databases and the challengesof AI agents operating with human credentials. Created by Austrian developerPeter Steinberger, who previously sold his company for $119 million, OpenClawrepresents a vision of what personal AI assistants could truly become—toolsthat remember, learn, and act autonomously within the digital environmentswhere users already spend their time.

The Full Story

Five days. That's really all ittook for Clawdbot -- an open-source AI assistant that promises to actually dothings on your computer, not just chat -- to go viral, implode, rebrand(twice!) and emerge as OpenClaw. Bruised but still breathing as a belovedcrustacean.

If you blinked over the pastfew days, you may have missed crypto scammers hijacking X accounts, a panickedfounder accidentally giving away his personal GitHub handle to bots and alobster mascot that briefly sprouted a disturbingly handsome human face. Oh,and somewhere in the chaos, the AI developer Anthropic sent a polite emailasking them to please, for the love of trademarks, change the name.

Welcome to OpenClaw. FormerlyClawdbot and briefly known as Moltbot, it's the same AI assistant under anewer, sturdier shell. And boy, does this lobster have lore.

What even is OpenClaw? And why should you care?

Here's the pitch that had techX (the platform formerly known as Twitter) losing its mind: Imagine an AIassistant that doesn't just chat; it does stuff. Real stuff. On your computer.Through the apps you use.

OpenClaw lives where youactually communicate, like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack, Discord, Signal-- you name it. You text it like you'd text a friend, and it remembers yourconversations from weeks ago and can send you proactive reminders. And if yougive it permission, it can automate tasks, run commands and basically act likea digital personal assistant that never sleeps. Unlike its founder.

AI Atlas

Created by Peter Steinberger,an Austrian developer who sold his company PSPDFKit for around $119 million andthen got bored enough to build this, OpenClaw represents what a lot of peoplethought Siri should have been all along. Not a voice-activated party trick, butan actual assistant that learns, remembers and gets things done.

OpenClaw doesn't require anyspecific hardware to run, though the Mac Mini seems popular. The core idea isthat OpenClaw itself mostly routes messages to AI companies' servers and callsAPIs, and the heavy AI work happens on whichever LLM you select: Claude,ChatGPT, Gemini.

Hardware only becomes a biggerconversation if you want to run large local models or do heavy automation.That's where powerful machines, like the Mac Mini, are often brought into theconversation. But that's not a requirement.

The project launched aboutthree weeks ago and hit 9,000 GitHub stars in 24 hours. By the time the dustsettled late last week, it had rocketed past 60,000 stars, with everyone fromAI researcher Andrej Karpathy to investor (and White House AI and crypto czar)David Sacks singing its praises. MacStories called it "the future ofpersonal AI assistants."

Then things got weird.

The rename that broke the internet (twice)

Ostensibly, last weekend,Anthropic slid into Steinberger's inbox to point out that "Clawd"(the assistant's name) and "Clawdbot" (the project name) were maybejust a little too similar to its own AI, Claude.

"As a trademark owner, wehave an obligation to protect our marks -- so we reached out directly to thecreator of Clawdbot about this," a representative from Anthropic said.

By 3:38 a.m. US Eastern Time onTuesday, Jan. 27, Steinberger made his call: "@Moltbot it is."

What happened next, accordingto Steinberger's posts on X and the previous MoltBot blog, was like a digitalheist movie, except everyone was a bot and the getaway cars were social mediahandles.

Within seconds -- literally,seconds -- automated bots sniped the @clawdbot handle. The squatter immediatelyposted a crypto wallet address. Meanwhile, in a sleep-deprived panic,Steinberger accidentally renamed his personal GitHub account instead of theorganization's account. Bots grabbed "steipete" before he couldblink. He said both crises required him to call in contacts at X and GitHub tomake fixes.

Then there was what thecreators dubbed "the Handsome Molty incident." Steinberger instructedMolty (the AI) to redesign its own icon. In one memorable attempt to make themascot look "5 years older," the AI generated a human man's facegrafted onto a lobster body. The internet turned it into a meme (a la HandsomeSquidward) within minutes.

Fake profiles claiming to be"Head of Engineering at Clawdbot" shilled crypto schemes. A fake$CLAWD cryptocurrency briefly hit a $16 million market cap before crashing over90%. "Any project that lists me as coin owner is a SCAM," Steinbergerposted on X, exasperated, to thousands of increasingly confused followers.

To continue the chaotic sagathat has unfolded over the past week, as of Jan. 30, the project has settled onrenaming Moltbot to OpenClaw, bringing in "Open" for open source and"Claw" for its lobster heritage. The name change makes sense due tothose considerations. However, the reasoning is actually much simpler:Steinberger just didn't like the name.

What made this AI tool go viral

Strip away the chaos, andOpenClaw is genuinely impressive.

Most AI tools are basically thesame. You open a website, type a question or query, wait for it to generate,copy the answer, paste it somewhere else, etc., etc. OpenClaw wants to flipthat script by having the assistant inside your existing conversations. You'realready in WhatsApp or iMessage, so why not just text it like you'd text acoworker?

The killer features? Well,there are three main things.

For one, persistent memory.OpenClaw doesn't forget everything when you close the app. It learns yourpreferences, tracks ongoing projects and actually remembers that conversationyou had last Tuesday.

There are also proactivenotifications. It can message you first when something matters, such as dailybriefings, deadline reminders and email triage summaries. You can wake up to atext saying, "Here are your three priorities today," without havingto ask the AI first.

Finally, there's realautomation. Depending on your setup, it can schedule tasks, fill forms,organize files, search your email, generate reports and control smart homedevices. People reported using it for everything from inbox cleanup to researchthreads that span days, and from habit tracking to automated weekly recaps ofwhat they shipped. The use cases seem to keep multiplying because once it'swired into your actual tools (calendar, notes, email), it stops feeling likesoftware and is just part of your routine.

Should you actually use this thing?

Time for real talk. OpenClaw isnot a polished, enterprise-ready product with vendor support and compliancepaperwork -- which is something Steinberger admits. It's a fast-moving,open-source project that just survived a near-death experience involving trademarklawyers, crypto scammers and catastrophically exposed databases. Whew.

So, you might be wondering,through all this hoopla, whether OpenClaw is even something you should actuallytry. Sure, this tool remembers information across weeks, works between apps andsystems and provides proactive notifications. But it's got rough edges. Thisisn't a tool for you if you need something that "just works" anddoesn't have complicated installation steps.

And you probably don't want totake this on if you don't want to think about -- and don't deeply understand --cybersecurity.

Key security risks to note

Security experts have raisedred flags about OpenClaw's safety as it grows in popularity. Because the agentis designed to run locally and interact with emails, files and credentials,even small setup mistakes can have big consequences.

In recent days, researchersspotted numerous publicly accessible OpenClaw deployments with little or noauthentication, exposing API keys, chat logs and system access to anyone whostumbled across them.

Some of the most visiblesecurity concerns have been social rather than technical, including fakeClawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw downloads and hijacked accounts used to spreadmalware or scams. While developers have moved quickly to patch specific flaws,security analysts say OpenClaw's turbulent debut highlights a larger issuefacing AI agents: As they become more autonomous and more powerful, thesecurity risks also scale just as fast.

Roy Akerman, head of cloud andidentity security at Silverfort, an identity security platform, said that therisk of a tool like OpenClaw isn't that it's overtly malicious. What's risky isthat it continues to act under a legitimate human identity, which can blur thelines between a user and the machine acting on their behalf.

"When an AI agentcontinues to operate using a human's credentials, after the human has loggedoff, it becomes a hybrid identity that most security controls aren't designedto recognize or govern," Akerman said. "Organizations shouldn't tryto block these tools outright, but they do need to change their posture, treatautonomous agents as identities, limit their privileges and monitor behaviorcontinuously, not just logins."

The little lobster that molted (and kept going)

According to Steinberger,"Molting is what lobsters do to grow." They shed their old shell andemerge bigger: from Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw.

OpenClaw is the same softwareas Clawdbot, offering the same impressive engineering and vision of whatpersonal AI assistants could be. But the past almost-120 hours forced it togrow up fast, dealing with security vulnerabilities, battening down authentication,and learning that viral success attracts not just users but scammers, squattersand, yes, intellectual property lawyers.

Through all of this, OpenClawis still standing. Discord is still buzzing. GitHub stars keep climbing. Andsomewhere in Vienna (or maybe London), Peter Steinberger is probably stillfending off DMs from people asking if he's launching a crypto token. (He's not.Please stop asking.)

Want to try OpenClaw yourself?Head to openclaw.ai for documentation, installation guides and, mostimportantly, a security checklist.

Just maybe use a spare laptop.And definitely don't name your project after anyone's trademarked AI model.Turns out that matters.

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