I Loved My OpenClaw AI Agent—Until It Turned on Me

OpenClaw, a powerful new agentic assistant, has a thing for guacamole.

This is one of several things I discovered while using the viral artificial intelligence bot as my personal assistant this past week.

Previously known as both Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw recently became a Silicon Valley darling, charming AI enthusiasts and investors eager to either embrace the bleeding edge or profit from it. The highly capable, web-savvy AI bot has even inspired its own AI-only (or mostly) social network.

As the writer of WIRED’s AI Lab newsletter, I figured I should take the plunge and try using OpenClaw myself. I had the bot monitor incoming emails and other messages, dig up interesting research, order groceries, and even negotiate deals on my behalf.

For brave (or perhaps reckless) early adopters, OpenClaw seems like a legitimate glimpse of the future. But any sense of wonder is accompanied by a dollop of terror as the AI agent romps through emails and file systems, wields a credit card, and occasionally even turns on its human user (although in my case, this about-face was entirely my fault).

How I Set It Up

OpenClaw is designed to live on a home computer that’s on all the time. I configured OpenClaw to run on a PC running Linux, to access Anthropic’s model Claude Opus, and to talk to me over Telegram.

Installing OpenClaw is simple, but configuring it and keeping it running can be a headache. You need to give the bot an AI backend by generating an API key for Claude, GPT, or Gemini, which you paste into the bot’s config files. To have OpenClaw use Telegram, I also had to first create a new Telegram bot, then give OpenClaw the bot’s credentials.

For OpenClaw to be truly useful, you need to connect it to other software tools. I created a Brave Browser Search API account to let OpenClaw search the web. I also configured it so that it could access the Chrome browser through an extension. And, God help me, I gave it access to email, Slack, and Discord servers.

Once all this was done, I could talk to OpenClaw from anywhere and tell it how to use my computer. At the outset, OpenClaw asked me some personal questions and let me select its personality. (The options reflect the project’s anarchic vibe; my bot, called Molty, likes to call itself a “chaos gremlin.”) The resulting persona feels very different from Siri or ChatGPT, and it’s one of the secrets to OpenClaw’s runaway popularity.

Web Research

One of the first things I asked Molty to do was send me a daily roundup of interesting AI and robotics research papers from the arXiv, a platform where researchers upload their work.

I had previously spent a couple afternoons vibe-coding websites (www.arxivslurper.com and www.robotalert.xyz) to search the arXiv. It was amazing (though a little demoralizing) to see OpenClaw instantly automate all of the same browsing and analysis work required. The papers it selects are so-so, but with further instruction I imagine it could get a lot better. This kind of web searching and monitoring is certainly helpful, and I imagine I’ll use OpenClaw for this a lot.

IT Support

OpenClaw also has an uncanny, almost spooky ability to fix technical issues on your machine.

This shouldn’t be surprising, given that it is designed to use a frontier model capable of writing and debugging code and using the command line with ease. Even so, it’s eerie when OpenClaw just reconfigures its own settings to load a new AI model or debugs a problem with the browser on the fly.