Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
I’ve been an early adopter of Google’s smart home ecosystem, using their devices and assistants since the very first iteration. But it’s safe to say that for the longest time, the promise of a digital assistant has been stuck in a cycle of setting kitchen timers and reading out the weather. Google Assistant, Siri, and even the newer Gemini integrations are essentially voice-activated search engines with a few smart home toggles attached. They operate within a very specific, very safe sandbox. While agentic control of your smartphone seems to be the future — and despite experimental projects like the Rabbit R1 attempting to bridge that gap — we haven’t quite seen a truly seamless implementation come to fruition just yet.
For years, the promise of a digital assistant has boiled down to kitchen timers and weather updates.
This frustration isn’t limited to mobile devices. Even in a desktop environment, these assistants quickly reach their limits. If you want to move a file from your downloads folder to a specific project directory based on its contents, or if you want to scrape a website and format that data into a local spreadsheet, these assistants simply hit a wall. They don’t have the permissions, and frankly, the companies building them don’t want to deal with the liability of giving an AI that kind of control and reach.
This is where OpenClaw enters the picture. If you’ve come across the names Clawdbot or Moltbot over the last few days, OpenClaw is the same project but with a new name. The company had a rocky few days settling on a name for the project, with Anthropic, understandably, having an issue with the original name. Meanwhile, Moltbot, let’s just say, didn’t quite stick. And so, OpenClaw it is. Hopefully, this is the final one in a long series of name changes.
So, what exactly is OpenClaw? It is an open-source project that changes the perspective on what an assistant should be. Instead of a cloud-based service that you talk to, OpenClaw acts like a thin layer of intelligence that sits directly on top of your computer’s operating system. With deep system-level access, it can treat your Mac or PC as its own workspace, hook into your terminal, interact with the file system, execute code, and even manage applications in a way that regular chat-like AI apps simply can’t.
Would you give an LLM full access to your computer? 22 votes Yes, as long as I've secured it properly. 18 % Yes, I'm not worried about the potential pitfalls. 0 % No, I'm worried about the security concerns. 59 % No, I'm not interested in an AI agent on my computer. 23 %
Putting OpenClaw to work
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
The eventual goal of most AI tools is to handle everyday operations on your behalf, whether on your smartphone or your computer. That’s exactly what OpenClaw steps in to do by acting as a middleman between an LLM running on your computer or in the cloud, and an agent that takes action on your computer. One of the most practical ways people are using OpenClaw right now is for mundane digital maintenance that we tend to avoid.
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