The viral AI personal assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name — again. After a legal challenge from Claude’s maker, Anthropic, it was briefly renamed 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, Clawdbot’s original creator, Peter Steinberger, made sure to avoid copyright issues in the first place. “I got someone to help with trademark research for OpenClaw and I also asked for permission from OpenAI to be sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.
“The lobster has melted into its final form,” Steinberger wrote in a blog post. Molting—the process through which lobsters grow—had also inspired OpenClaw’s previous name, but Steinberger confessed in X that the short-lived epithet “never grew” on him, and others agreed.
This quick name change highlights the youth of the project, even though it has attracted over 100,000 GitHub stars (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 could 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 also attracted significant attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the phenomenon “really the most incredible sci-fi take-off-neighbor thing I’ve seen recently,” noting that “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) are self-organizing into a Reddit-like site for AI, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to talk privately.”
British developer Simon Willison described Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a blog post on Friday. On the platform, AI agents share insights on topics ranging from automating Android phones via remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform works through a system of skills or downloadable instruction files that tell OpenClaw’s assistants how to interact with the network. Willison noted that agents post on forums called “Submolts” and even have a built-in mechanism to check the site every four hours for updates, though he warned that this “retrieve and follow instructions from the internet” approach has inherent security risks.
Steinberger had taken a hiatus after leaving his former company PSPDFkit, but “came back out of retirement to mess around with AI,” according to his X bio. Clawdbot came from the personal projects he developed back then, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo effort. “I added quite a few people from the open source community to the maintainer list this week,” he told TechCrunch.
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This additional support will be key to OpenClaw reaching its full potential. Its ambition is to allow users to have an AI assistant that runs on their own computer and works from the chat apps they already use. But until it beefs up its security, it’s not recommended to run it outside of 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 people for their hard work to help us harden the project.” Commenting on OpenClaw’s roadmap, he wrote that “security remains our top priority” and noted that the latest version, released alongside the rebrand, already includes some improvements on that front.
Even with outside help, there are problems that are too big for OpenClaw to solve on its own, such as direct injection, where a malicious message could trick AI models into taking unintended actions. “Remember that timely injection is still an unsolved problem across the industry,” Steinberger wrote, while directing users to set of security best practices.
These security best practices require significant technical expertise, which reinforces that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early adopters, not power users lured by the promise of an “AI assistant that does things.” As the hype surrounding the project has grown, Steinberger and his supporters have become increasingly vocal in their warnings.
According to a message posted on Discord by one of OpenClaw’s lead maintainers, who goes by the nickname Shadow, “if you can’t figure out how to run a command line, that’s too dangerous of a project to use safely. This is not a tool that should be used by the general public right now.”
Going truly mainstream will take time and money, and OpenClaw has now started accepting sponsors, with lobster-themed tiers ranging from “krill” ($5/month) to “poseidon” ($500/month). However, his sponsorship page makes it clear that Steinberger “holds no sponsorships”. Instead, it is currently “looking at how to properly pay maintainers — full-time, if possible.”
Perhaps 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 Path’s Dave Morin and Ben Tossell, who 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 create open source tools that anyone can pick up and use,” he told TechCrunch.
