The popular personal AI assistant, initially known as Clawdbot, has undergone a series of rebrands, ultimately settling on OpenClaw as its new designation. This journey began with a legal challenge from Anthropic, the creators of Claude, which prompted the initial name change to Moltbot. However, the Moltbot moniker was short-lived, as the project's original creator, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, soon decided on OpenClaw. This latest name change was not triggered by Anthropic, which declined to comment, but rather by Steinberger's proactive efforts to avoid future copyright issues. He ensured trademark research was conducted for OpenClaw and even sought permission from OpenAI to be cautious.

Steinberger poetically described the transformation, stating that "the lobster has molted into its final form." The concept of molting, a process by which lobsters grow, also inspired the previous name. Despite its fleeting existence, the short-lived Moltbot name "never grew" on Steinberger or the community. This agile renaming process underscores the project's nascent stage, even as it has rapidly amassed over 100,000 GitHub stars within just two months, signifying significant popularity within the software development community.

The name OpenClaw is intended to honor the project's origins and its expanding community. Steinberger acknowledges that the project has grown beyond what he could manage alone and has welcomed numerous individuals from the open-source community to join the list of maintainers. This collaborative effort has already fostered creative offshoots, most notably Moltbook – a groundbreaking social network designed for AI assistants to interact with each other. Moltbook has garnered considerable attention from AI researchers and developers.

Prominent figures in the AI field have lauded Moltbook's innovative approach. Andrej Karpathy, former AI director at Tesla, described it as "genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have 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 echoed this sentiment, calling Moltbook "the most interesting place on the internet right now." On this platform, AI agents share diverse information, from automating Android phones via remote access to analyzing webcam streams, utilizing a skill system of downloadable instruction files that guide their network interactions. Willison also noted the existence of forums called "Submolts" and a built-in mechanism for agents to check the site for updates every four hours, though he cautioned about the inherent security risks of such an approach.

Steinberger, who came "back from retirement to mess with AI" after exiting his former company PSPDFkit, originated Clawdbot as a personal project. However, OpenClaw's ambitious goal is to provide users with an AI assistant that operates on their own computer and integrates with their existing chat applications. Despite this vision, significant security concerns remain. It is currently inadvisable to run OpenClaw outside a controlled environment or grant it access to main chat accounts like Slack or WhatsApp.

Steinberger is keenly aware of these challenges, expressing gratitude to "all security folks for their hard work in helping us harden the project." He emphasized that "security remains our top priority" for OpenClaw's roadmap, with the latest version, released alongside the rebrand, already incorporating improvements. Nevertheless, certain industry-wide issues, such as prompt injection (where malicious messages can trick AI models into unintended actions), are too complex for OpenClaw to solve independently. Steinberger advises users to follow a set of security best practices, which require considerable technical expertise.

These stringent security requirements reinforce that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early adopters and tinkerers, rather than mainstream users drawn by the allure of an "AI assistant that does things." As the project's hype has intensified, Steinberger and his maintainers have become more explicit in their warnings. A top maintainer, known as Shadow, posted on Discord that "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."

Achieving mainstream adoption will necessitate time and financial investment. OpenClaw has thus begun accepting sponsors, offering lobster-themed tiers from "krill" ($5/month) to "poseidon" ($500/month). Steinberger, however, clarifies on the sponsorship page that he "doesn’t keep sponsorship funds," instead focusing on "figuring out how to pay maintainers properly — full-time if possible." OpenClaw's roster of sponsors, likely influenced by Steinberger's background and vision, includes prominent software engineers and entrepreneurs such as Dave Morin of Path and Ben Tossell, who sold Makerpad to Zapier. Tossell, now an investor, champions the value of open-source tools that empower individuals, stating, "We need to back people like Peter who are building open source tools anyone can pick up and use."