Two months ago, I hacked together a weekend project. What started as “WhatsApp Relay” now has over 100,000 GitHub stars and drew 2 million visitors in a single week.
Today, I’m excited to announce our new name: OpenClaw.
The Naming Journey
We’ve been through some names.
Clawd was born in November 2025—a playful pun on “Claude” with a claw. It felt perfect until Anthropic’s legal team politely asked us to reconsider. Fair enough.
Moltbot came next, chosen in a chaotic 5am Discord brainstorm with the community. Molting represents growth - lobsters shed their shells to become something bigger. It was meaningful, but it never quite rolled off the tongue.
OpenClaw is where we land. And this time, we did our homework: trademark searches came back clear, domains have been purchased, migration code has been written. The name captures what this project has become:
Open : Open source, open to everyone, community-driven
: Open source, open to everyone, community-driven Claw: Our lobster heritage, a nod to where we came from
What OpenClaw Is
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