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

The viral personal AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name — again. After a legal challenge from Claude’s maker, Anthropic, it had briefly rebranded as Moltbot, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.

The latest name change wasn’t 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 researching trademarks for OpenClaw and also asked OpenAI for permission just to be sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.

“The lobster has molted into its final form,” Steinberger wrote in a blog post. Molting — the process through which lobsters grow — had also inspired OpenClaw’s previous name, but Steinberger confessed on X that the short-lived moniker “never grew” on him, and others agreed.

This quick name change highlights the project’s youth, even as it has attracted over 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 maintain alone,” he wrote.

The OpenClaw community has already spawned creative offshoots, including Moltbook — a social network where AI assistants can interact with each other. The platform has attracted significant attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the phenomenon “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” noting that “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.”

British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a 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 operates through a skill system, or downloadable instruction files that tell OpenClaw assistants how to interact with the network. Willison noted that agents post to forums called “Submolts” and even have a built-in mechanism to check the site every four hours for updates, though he cautioned this “fetch and follow instructions from the internet” approach carries inherent security risks.

Steinberger had taken a break after exiting his former company PSPDFkit, but “came back from retirement to mess with AI,” per his X bio. Clawdbot stemmed from the personal projects he developed then, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo endeavor. “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 key for OpenClaw to reach its full potential. Its ambition is to let users have an AI assistant that runs on their own computer and works from the chat apps they already use. But until it ramps up its security, it is still inadvisable to run 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 security folks for their hard work in helping us harden the project.” Commenting on OpenClaw’s roadmap, he wrote that “security remains our top priority” and noted that the latest version, released along with the rebrand, already includes some improvements on that front.

Even with external help, there are problems that are too big for OpenClaw to solve on its own, such as prompt injection, where a malicious message could trick AI models into taking unintended actions. “Remember that prompt injection is still an industry-wide unsolved problem,” Steinberger wrote, while directing users to a set of security best practices. 

These security best practices require significant technical expertise, which reinforces that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early tinkerers, not mainstream users lured by the promise of an “AI assistant that does things.” As the hype around the project has grown, Steinberger and his supporters have become increasingly vocal in their warnings.

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

Truly going mainstream will take time and money, and OpenClaw has now started to accept sponsors, with lobster-themed tiers ranging from “krill” ($5/month) to “poseidon” ($500/month). But its sponsorship page makes it clear that Steinberger “doesn’t keep sponsorship funds.” Instead, he is currently “figuring out how to pay maintainers properly — full-time if possible.”

Likely helped by Steinberger’s pedigree and vision, OpenClaw’s roster of sponsors includes software engineers and entrepreneurs who have founded and built other well-known projects, such as Path’s 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 AI’s potential in people’s hands. “We need to back people like Peter who are building open source tools anyone can pick up and use,” he told TechCrunch.