What if your AI agent assistant didn't just chat or write code but carried out real, helpful tasks -- all on its own? And what if it could perform especially complicated tasks, like running scheduled tasks, managing your Gmail and WhatsApp messages or even controlling your smart home -- again, all on its own?
That's the promise of OpenClaw (known briefly as Clawdbot and even more briefly as Moltbot), an open-source AI agent designed to execute tasks autonomously across all the services and apps you use most.
OpenClaw had quite the chaotic genesis. The platform's almost overnight viral success brought on a rapid succession of crypto scammers hijacking X accounts, a panicked founder accidentally giving away his personal GitHub handle to bots and a lobster mascot that briefly sprouted a disturbingly handsome human face. Oh, and somewhere in the chaos, the AI developer Anthropic (which owns a set of commercial LLMs named Claude) sent a polite email asking them to please, for the love of trademarks, change the name from Clawdbot.
This strangely elaborate internet lore birthed OpenClaw. Behind the drama, it's the same AI assistant as Clawdbot, but with a newer, sturdier shell. And while this technology is drawing major attention, it's also drawing major scrutiny over the security risks that come along with these functionalities that are only beginning to be fully understood.
What is OpenClaw?
Here's the OpenClaw pitch that had online tech communities buzzing: an AI assistant that doesn't just chat; it does stuff. Real stuff. On your computer. Through the apps you use every day.
OpenClaw lives where you communicate, like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack, Discord, Signal and more. You can text it like you'd text a friend, and it remembers your conversations from weeks ago and can send you proactive reminders. And if you give it permission, it can automate tasks, run commands and basically act like a digital personal assistant that never sleeps.
Peter Steinberger is an Austrian developer who sold his company PSPDFKit for around $119 million and then got bored enough to build this AI.
OpenClaw represents what a lot of people thought Siri should have been all along: not a voice-activated party trick, but an actual assistant that learns, remembers and gets things done. (CNET reached out to Steinberger for comment on this story.)
OpenClaw doesn't require any specific hardware to run, though the Mac Mini seems like the most popular choice. The core idea is that OpenClaw itself mostly routes messages to AI companies' servers and calls APIs, and the heavy AI work happens on whichever LLM you select: Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini.
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