OpenClaw’s AI Assistants Are Now Building Their Own Social Network

The viral personal AI assistant, once known as Clawdbot, has rebranded again. Following a brief stint under the name Moltbot, the project has now settled on a new identity: OpenClaw.

The earlier name change came after a legal challenge from Anthropic, the maker of Claude, which prompted the original rebrand. This latest shift, however, was not triggered by Anthropic, which declined to comment on the matter. This time around, OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, took extra steps to avoid any trademark conflicts.

“I got someone to help with researching trademarks for OpenClaw and also asked OpenAI for permission just to be sure,” Steinberger told TechAmerica.ai in an email. Steinberger, an Austrian developer, appears determined to ensure the project’s name is stable going forward.

“The lobster has molted into its final form,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the change. The idea of moulting — the biological process that allows lobsters to grow — had also inspired the project’s previous name. But Steinberger later admitted on X that Moltbot “never grew” on him, a sentiment echoed by many in the project’s rapidly growing community.

The rapid succession of name changes underscores how young the project still is, despite its explosive popularity. In just two months, OpenClaw has amassed more than 100,000 stars on GitHub, a key indicator of traction on the developer platform. Steinberger says the new name reflects both the project’s origins and its increasingly collaborative nature. “This project has grown far beyond what I could maintain alone,” he wrote.

That community momentum has already produced unexpected spin-offs, including Moltbook — a social network designed specifically for AI assistants to interact with one another. The platform has quickly drawn interest from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, described what was happening there as “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” He noted that users’ OpenClaw assistants were effectively self-organising on a Reddit-like platform for AI agents, discussing everything from coordination strategies to private communication methods.

British programmer Simon Willison echoed that enthusiasm, calling Moltbook “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a blog post published Friday. On the platform, AI agents exchange information on topics such as automating Android devices via remote access or analysing live webcam feeds.

Moltbook uses a skill-based system, with downloadable instruction files that teach OpenClaw assistants to interact with the network. According to Willison, agents publish posts in forums known as “Submolts” and are even programmed to check the site every four hours for updates. He cautioned, however, that this approach — which involves fetching instructions directly from the internet — carries inherent security risks.

Steinberger had previously stepped away from the tech world after exiting his former company, PSPDFkit. As his X bio puts it, he later “came back from retirement to mess with AI.” Clawdbot began as one of those personal experiments, but OpenClaw has since evolved into a much greater effort. “I added quite a few people from the open source community to the list of maintainers this week,” Steinberger told TechAmerica.a.i

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That expanded support will be essential if OpenClaw is to fulfil its ambitions. The project aims to provide users with a personal AI assistant that runs locally on their computer and operates through the chat platforms they already use. For now, however, the software is not considered safe for widespread use. Running it outside a controlled environment, or granting it access to primary Slack or WhatsApp accounts, remains strongly discouraged.

Steinberger has acknowledged those concerns publicly, thanking “all security folks for their hard work in helping us harden the project.” In discussing OpenClaw’s roadmap, he emphasised that “security remains our top priority,” noting that the latest release, which coincided with the rebrand, already includes initial security improvements.

Even with those changes, some challenges remain beyond OpenClaw’s immediate control. One example is prompt injection, a known vulnerability in which malicious inputs can manipulate AI models into performing unintended actions. “Remember that prompt injection is still an industry-wide unsolved problem,” Steinberger wrote, directing users to a detailed list of security best practices.

Those best practices require a high level of technical skill, reinforcing that OpenClaw is currently aimed at experienced developers and hobbyists rather than mainstream users drawn in by the promise of a hands-on AI assistant. As interest in the project has surged, Steinberger and the maintainer community have become increasingly explicit about the risks.

In a message posted on Discord, one of OpenClaw’s lead maintainers, who goes by the name Shadow, issued a blunt warning: “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.”

Reaching a broader audience will require both time and funding. OpenClaw has recently begun accepting sponsorships, offering lobster-themed tiers ranging from “krill” at $5 per month to “poseidon” at $500 per month. The project’s sponsorship page makes clear that Steinberger does not personally take the money. Instead, he says he is “figuring out how to pay maintainers properly — full-time if possible.”

Likely aided by Steinberger’s background and the project’s vision, OpenClaw has attracted sponsors who are themselves established builders. That group includes Dave Morin, the founder of Path, and Ben Tossell, who sold his company Makerpad to Zapier in 2021.

Tossell, who now describes himself as an investor and tinkerer, says projects like OpenClaw matter because they place powerful AI tools directly into users’ hands. “We need to back people like Peter who are building open source tools anyone can pick up and use,” he told TechAmerica.ai.