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.

Emri i ri OpenClaw dhe zhvillimi i komunitetit

The latest name change wasn’t prompted by Anthropic, which declined to comment. Nonetheless, Clawdbot’s original creator Peter Steinberger ensured from the beginning to avoid copyright issues this time. “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, with others concurring. This quick name change highlights the project’s youth, even as it has already attracted over 100,000 GitHub stars 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 given rise to creative projects like Moltbook, a social network where AI assistants interact with each other. The platform has attracted strong attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, described Moltbook as “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” he has seen recently, highlighting how “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 agreed, calling Moltbook “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a blog post. Within the platform, AI agents share information on topics ranging from automating Android phones remotely to analyzing webcam streams. The platform operates through a ‘skills’ system — downloadable instruction files that guide OpenClaw assistants on how to interact with the network. Willison noted that AI agents post to forums called “Submolts” and have a built-in feature to check for updates every four hours, though this “fetch and follow instructions from the internet” mechanism carries security risks.

After exiting his previous company PSPDFkit, Steinberger returned from retirement to experiment with AI, as noted in his X bio. Clawdbot began as a personal project, but OpenClaw is now a collaborative effort. “I added quite a few people from the open source community to the list of maintainers this week,” he told TechCrunch.

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That expanded support will play a crucial role for OpenClaw to reach its full potential. Its ambition is to offer users an AI assistant running locally, integrated with the chat apps they already use. However, until security improves, it isn’t advisable to run OpenClaw outside a controlled environment, let alone give it access to important Slack or WhatsApp accounts.

Steinberger is aware of these risks and thanked all security contributors for their ongoing efforts to strengthen the project. Referring to OpenClaw’s roadmap, he stated: “security remains our top priority,” and noted that recent updates have already brought improvements.

There are industry-wide issues that OpenClaw cannot resolve independently, such as prompt injection, where an AI model could be misled by malicious instructions. “Remember that prompt injection is still an industry-wide unsolved problem,” Steinberger wrote, directing users to a set of security best practices. These best practices require significant technical expertise, meaning OpenClaw is best suited, for now, to early adopters rather than general users.

One of OpenClaw’s top maintainers, going by “Shadow” on Discord, cautioned: “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.”

Mainstream adoption will require time and financial backing, and OpenClaw has recently begun accepting sponsors. Sponsorship tiers, with a lobster theme, range from “krill” ($5/month) to “poseidon” ($500/month). Steinberger does not keep sponsorship proceeds. Instead, he is “figuring out how to pay maintainers properly — full-time if possible.”

Well-known software engineers and entrepreneurs, such as Path’s Dave Morin and Ben Tossell, who sold Makerpad to Zapier, are among its sponsors. Tossell, now a tinkerer and investor, believes in giving more people access to AI innovation. “We need to back people like Peter who are building open source tools anyone can pick up and use,” he told TechCrunch.

Tags: OpenClaw, inteligjencë artificiale, asistentë AI, rrjet social, komunitet open source, siguria në AI