The viral personal AI assistant previously known as Clawdbot has a new name again. It was briefly rebranded as Moltbot after legal issues from Claude’s creator, Anthropic, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.
The recent name change was not prompted by Anthropic, which declined to comment. But this time, Peter Steinberger, the original creator of Clawdbot, made sure to avoid copyright issues from the start. “I’ve been looking for someone to help me research the trademark for OpenClaw and asked permission from OpenAI to make sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.
“The lobster has molted and transformed into 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 that the short-lived nickname “never outgrew” X, and others agreed.
This quick name change highlights the youth of the project, despite attracting more than 100,000 GitHub stars (a measure of the popularity of a software development platform) in just two months. According to Steinberger, OpenClaw’s new name is a nod to OpenClaw’s roots and community. “This project has grown beyond what I can sustain on my own,” 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 interest from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the phenomenon “the most amazing science fiction takeoff-adjacent phenomenon I’ve seen in a while,” adding, “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) are organizing themselves on Reddit-like AI sites, where they discuss a variety of topics, from, for example, how to speak in private.”
British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook in a blog post on Friday as “the most interesting place on the Internet right now.” On the platform, AI agents share information on a variety of topics, from automating Android phones with remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform operates through a technical system or downloadable instruction file that tells the OpenClaw assistant how to interact with the network. Willison pointed out that agents post to a forum called “Submolts” and even have a built-in mechanism to check the site for updates every four hours. But he warned that the “take instructions from the Internet and follow them” approach carries inherent security risks.
Steinberger took a brief break after leaving his previous company, PSPDFkit, but “returned to work on AI after retirement,” according to his X bio. While Clawdbot originated from a personal project he was developing at the time, OpenClaw is no longer his solo effort. “We added quite a few people from the open source community to our list of maintainers this week,” he told TechCrunch.
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This additional support will be key to helping OpenClaw reach its full potential. The goal is to enable users to have an AI assistant that runs on their computers and works with the chat apps they already use. However, until security is improved, it is still not recommended to give access to your primary Slack or WhatsApp account, let alone run it outside of a controlled environment.
Steinberger said he was aware of these concerns and thanked “all the security personnel who helped strengthen the project.” “Security is our top priority,” he wrote of OpenClaw’s roadmap, noting that the latest version released alongside the rebrand already includes some improvements.
Even with outside help, there are problems that are too big for OpenClaw to solve on its own, such as prompt injection where malicious messages can trick AI models into taking unintended actions. “Remember that rapid injection is still an unresolved problem across the industry,” Steinberger wrote, walking users through a series of security best practices.
These security best practices require significant technical expertise, which supports the point that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early tinkerers rather than mainstream users attracted by the promise of an “AI assistant that gets the job done.” As the hype for the project grew, Steinberger and his supporters became increasingly vocal in their warnings.
According to a message posted on Discord by one of OpenClaw’s top maintainers, nicknamed Shadow, “If you can’t understand how to run the command line, this is too risky a project to use safely. It’s not a tool that should be used by the general public at this time.”
Going truly mainstream takes time and money, and OpenClaw has now begun accepting sponsors in lobster-themed tiers ranging from “Krill” ($5/month) to “Poseidon” ($500/month). However, the sponsorship page clearly states that Steinberger “does not maintain sponsorship funds.” Instead, he is now “looking at ways to pay maintainers a decent salary, preferably full-time.”
OpenClaw’s roster of backers, which appears to have benefited from Steinberger’s pedigree and vision, 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 into people’s hands. “We need to support people like Peter who are building open source tools that anyone can pick up and use,” he told TechCrunch.
