For NanoClaw creator Gabriel Cohen, it’s been a whirlwind.
About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw, which he built during a weekend coding spree, on Hacker News as a small, open source, and secure alternative to AI agent building sensation OpenClaw. The post went viral.
“I was sitting on the couch wearing sweatpants,” Cohen told TechCrunch. “I basically melted into (it) all weekend, probably for almost 48 hours straight.”
About three weeks ago, an X post by renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy praising NanoClaw went viral.
About a week ago, Cohen shut down his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw, starting a company called NanoCo around it. The attention from Hacker News and Karpathy led to 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks (people building new versions from the project), and over 50 contributors. He has already added hundreds of updates to the project and has hundreds more in the queue.
Now, Cohen announced Friday a deal with Docker to integrate Docker Sandbox into NanoClaw. Docker essentially invented the container technology on which NanoClaw is based, and is a company with millions of developers and approximately 80,000 enterprise customers.
OpenClaw’s terrible security
It all started a few months ago when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother Laser Cohen. The startup offered marketing services such as market research, go-to-market analysis, and blog posts through a small team using AI agents.
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The agency began booking customers and was on track to reach $1 million in annual recurring revenue, the brothers told TechCrunch.
“It’s been doing very well, we’ve had great traction. I’m a big believer in the business model of an AI-native services company that has margins and operates like a software company, but is actually delivering a service,” said Cohen, a computer programmer who previously worked at website hosting company Wix.
He had built the agents the startup was using primarily using Claude code, each designed to perform a specific task. But “pieces” were missing, he says. Agents can work as directed, but humans couldn’t schedule work in advance or connect agents to team communication tools like WhatsApp to assign tasks. (WhatsApp is to most of the world what Slack is to corporate America.)
Cohen heard about OpenClaw, a popular AI agent tool. Its creator currently works at OpenAI. Cohen used it to build the final interface and loved it.
“This is the part that connects all the separate workflows I’ve been building,” he says, and he quickly decided “I want to add one workflow for every task a startup has to handle, whether it’s R&D, product, or customer management.”
But then OpenClaw threatens Bejesus out of him.
While investigating a performance issue, I discovered a file that the OpenClaw agent had downloaded all WhatsApp messages and stored them on my computer in unencrypted plain text. I had explicit access to all personal messages as well as work-related messages.
OpenClaw has been widely criticized as a “security nightmare” due to the way it accesses memory and account privileges. Once a machine is installed, it is difficult to restrict access to data on the machine.
Given the project’s popularity, this problem may improve over time, but Cohen had other concerns. That’s the scale of OpenClaw. When he was researching its security options, he looked at all the packages that were bundled with it. Among them was an “obscure” open source project he himself wrote several months ago for editing PDFs using the Google image editing model. he didn’t know it existed. He was not actively maintaining the project.
He realized that there was no way to verify all of OpenClaw’s code and its dependencies. That dependency spanned 800,000 lines of code by some estimates.
So he built his own code, just 500 lines of code, intended for company use and shared it. He based this on Apple’s new container technology. This creates an isolated environment that prevents software from accessing data on your machine beyond what it is explicitly authorized to use.
go viral
A few weeks after sharing it on Hacker News, his cell phone started ringing at 4 a.m. A friend saw Karpathy’s post and encouraged Cohen to get up and start tweeting, which he did and a public discussion with the famous AI researcher began.
The attention to NanoClaw followed like a landslide. More Tweets, YouTube reviews from programmers, and news articles. The domain squatters also stole the URL of the NanoClaw website. The correct one is nanoclaw.dev.
So Oleg Šelajev, a developer working at Docker, got in touch. Seeing this buzz, Shelayev modified NanoClaw and replaced Apple’s container technology with Sandbox, a competing replacement for Docker.
Cohen did not hesitate to push for sandbox support as part of the main NanoClaw project. “This is no longer my own personal agent running on a Mac Mini,” he remembers thinking. “It’s got a community. Thousands of people are using it. I said, yeah, I’m going to go standard.”
While the past few weeks have brought a lot of changes for Cohen and his brother Laser, who are now NanoCo’s CEO and president, respectively, there is one area that still needs clarification. That’s how NanoCo makes money.
NanoClaw is free and open source, and the Coens vow it will remain that way for as long as this continues. They know that if they betray the open source community by changing it, they will be roped in as villains. The Cohens now make a living through fundraising by friends and family.
They are still cautious about announcing commercial plans, mainly because they haven’t had a chance to fully develop them yet, but VCs are already taking calls.
The strategy is to build fully supported commercial products with services that include so-called forward-deployment engineers, experts embedded directly in customer companies to help them build and manage their systems. This will likely focus on helping businesses build and maintain secure agents. But it’s a crowded field that gets more crowded by the hour.
But given the huge developer community that NanoClaw has just unlocked with Docker, we should expect to hear more about this soon.
Pictured above, from left to right, is Laser and Gabriel Cohen.
