The viral personal AI assistant previously known as Clawdbot has a new name again. After a legal challenge from Claude’s maker Anthropic, the company briefly rebranded itself to Moltbot, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.
The name change was not ordered by Anthropic, which declined to comment. But this time, Clawdbot’s original creator Peter Steinberger tried to avoid copyright issues from the beginning. “We found someone to help us with the trademark research for OpenClaw, and just to be safe, we also asked permission from OpenAI,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.
“The lobster has shed its skin and assumed its final form,” Steinberger wrote in a blog post. Molting (the process by which lobsters grow) also inspired Openclaw’s previous name, but Steinberger confessed in X that the short-lived nickname “never outgrew” him, and others agreed.
This quick name change highlights the project’s youth, even though it has attracted more than 100,000 GitHub stars (a measure of popularity on the software development platform) in just two months. Steinberger said OpenClaw’s new name pays homage to its roots and community. “This project has grown far beyond what I could sustain alone,” he wrote.
The OpenClaw community has already produced creative offshoots, such as Moltbook, a social network that allows AI assistants to interact with each other. This platform has received significant attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrei Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called this phenomenon “truly the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent phenomenon I’ve seen in a while,” noting that “People’s Clawdbot (moltbot, now OpenClaw) has self-organized on a Reddit-like site for AI to discuss a variety of topics, such as how to talk privately.”
British programmer Simon Willison described Maltbook as “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a blog post on Friday. On this platform, AI agents share information on a wide range of topics, from automating Android smartphones with remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform works through a skill system or downloadable instruction files that instruct OpenClaw assistants how to interact with the network. Willison noted that the agent posts on a forum called “Submolts” and even has a built-in mechanism to check the site for updates every four hours, but he warned that this “taking instructions from the internet and following them” approach comes with inherent security risks.
Steinberger was on leave after leaving his previous company, PSPDFkit, but according to his X bio, he “came back from retirement to tinker with AI.” Clawdbot grew out of a personal project he developed at the time, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo effort. “This week we added quite a few people from the open source community to our list of maintainers,” he told TechCrunch.
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This additional support is key to enabling OpenClaw to reach its full potential. The goal is to give users an AI assistant that runs on their computers and works from the chat apps they already use. However, it is not recommended to run it outside of a managed environment until security is tightened. We especially don’t recommend giving them access to your main Slack or WhatsApp account.
Steinberger was fully aware of these concerns and thanked “all the security personnel who worked hard to strengthen the project.” Commenting on OpenClaw’s roadmap, he said that “security remains our top priority” and that the latest version released with the rebrand already includes some improvements on that front.
Even with outside help, there are problems that are too big to solve with OpenClaw alone, such as prompt injection, where malicious messages can cause AI models to perform unintended actions. While walking users through a series of security best practices, Steinberger writes, “Remember that prompt injection is still an open issue across the industry.”
These security best practices require significant technical expertise. This confirms that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early modders rather than mainstream users who are seduced by the promise of an “AI assistant that does things for you.” As the hype around the project grew, Steinberger and his supporters increasingly sounded the alarm.
According to a message posted on Discord by one of OpenClaw’s top maintainers (known by the nickname Shadow), “If you don’t know how to run the command line, this is too dangerous a project to use safely. At this time, this is not a tool that should be used by the general public.”
It takes time and money to truly go mainstream, and OpenClaw is now accepting sponsorships at lobster-themed levels ranging from “Krill” ($5 per month) to “Poseidon” ($500 per month). However, its sponsorship page reveals that Steinberger “does not hold sponsorship funds.” Instead, he is currently “figuring out how to properly pay the maintainers, preferably full-time.”
Perhaps fueled by Steinberger’s pedigree and vision, OpenClaw’s roster of sponsors includes software engineers and entrepreneurs who founded and built other high-profile projects, such as Path’s Dave Moerin and Ben Tossell, who sold Makerpad to Zapier in 2021.
Tossel now describes himself as a tinkerer and investor, and sees value in putting the potential of AI in people’s hands. “We need to support people like Peter who are building open source tools that everyone can get and use,” he told TechCrunch.
