The now-viral X post from Meta AI security researcher Summer Yu reads, at first, like satire. She told her OpenClaw AI agent to check her overstuffed email inbox and suggest what to delete or archive.
The agent proceeded to run amok. It started deleting all her email in a “speed run” while ignoring her commands from her phone telling it to stop.
“I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb,” she wrote, posting images of the ignored stop prompts as receipts.
The Mac Mini, an affordable Apple computer that sits flat on a desk and fits in the palm of your hand, has become the favored device these days for running OpenClaw. (The Mini is selling “like hotcakes,” one “confused” Apple employee apparently told famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy when he bought one to run an OpenClaw alternative called NanoClaw.)
OpenClaw is, of course, the open-source AI agent that achieved fame through Moltbook, an AI-only social network. OpenClaw agents were at the center of that now largely debunked episode on Moltbook in which it looked like the AIs were plotting against humans.
But OpenClaw’s mission, according to its GitHub page, is not focused on social networks. It aims to be a personal AI assistant that runs on your own devices.
The Silicon Valley in-crowd has fallen so in love with OpenClaw that “claw” and “claws” have become the buzzwords of choice for agents that run on personal hardware. Other such agents include ZeroClaw, IronClaw, and PicoClaw. Y Combinator’s podcast team even appeared on their most recent episode dressed in lobster costumes.
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