OpenClaw’s AI assistants are now building their own social network | TechCrunch

The viral AI personal assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name once again. After a legal challenge from Claude’s creator, Anthropic, it was briefly renamed Moltbot, but has now opted for 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 from the start. “I got someone to help with trademark research for OpenClaw and also asked permission from OpenAI just to be sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.

“The lobster has taken its final shape,” Steinberger wrote in one blog post. Moulting – the process by which lobsters grow – had also inspired OpenClaw’s previous name, but Steinberger relented on X that the short-lived name “never grew on him,” and others agreed.

This quick name change emphasizes the project’s youth, even as it has attracted more than 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 alone,” he wrote.

The OpenClaw community has already spawned creative offshoots, including Moltbook – a social network where AI assistants can communicate with each other. The platform has attracted a lot of attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the phenomenon “truly the most incredible thing sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I recently saw that “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) organize themselves into a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, such as how to speak in private.”

British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the Internet right now” in one blog post on Friday. On the platform, AI agents share information on topics ranging from automating Android phones via remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform works through a skills system or downloadable instruction files that tell OpenClaw 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 for updates every four hours, though he warned that this “pick and follow instructions from the Internet” approach has inherent security risks.

Steinberger had taken a break after leaving his former company PSPDFkit, but “came back from retirement to dabble in AI,” according to his X-bio. Clawdbot emerged from the personal projects he developed at the time, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo venture. “I added quite a few people from the open source community to the list of maintainers this week,” he told TechCrunch.

That additional support will be critical for OpenClaw to reach its full potential. The ambition is for users to have an AI assistant that runs on their own computer and works from the chat apps they already use. But until security is improved, it’s still not recommended to use 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 in helping us strengthen 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 too big for OpenClaw to solve on its own, such as rapid injection, where a malicious message can trick AI models into taking unintended actions. “Remember that rapid injection is still an industry-wide unsolved problem,” Steinberger wrote, directing users to a set of security best practices.

These security best practices require significant technical expertise, reinforcing that OpenClaw is currently best suited for novice tinkerers, rather than regular users lured by the promise of an “AI assistant that does things.” As hype around the project has grown, Steinberger and his supporters have become increasingly vocal in their warnings.

According to a post on Discord by one of OpenClaw’s top maintainers, who goes by the nickname Shadow, “If you don’t understand how to run a command line, this is far too dangerous a project to use safely. This is not a tool that should be used by the general public at this time.”

Becoming 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). But the sponsorship page makes it clear that Steinberger “does not track sponsorship funds.” Instead, he is currently “figuring out how to pay the administrators properly – full-time if possible.”

Likely aided by Steinberger’s pedigree and vision, OpenClaw’s list of sponsors includes software engineers and entrepreneurs who founded and built other well-known projects such as Path is 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 in the hands of people. “We need to support people like Peter who are building open source tools that anyone can access and use,” he told TechCrunch.