🦞 From Clawd to OpenClaw: A Name That Finally Stuck
It’s been a wild ride for one of open-source AI’s most beloved mascots—the lobster. What began as Clawd (a cheeky mashup of Claude and claw, nodding to both Anthropic’s model and crustacean charisma) quickly ran into trademark headwinds. A polite nudge from Anthropic led to Moltbot, a poetic but clunky pivot referencing molting—symbolizing growth, yes, but also confusing users who just wanted to use the thing.
Now? It’s OpenClaw—and this time, it’s official, intentional, and built to last.
- Open: Not just in name—it’s fully open source, community-governed, and designed for self-hosting. No cloud lock-in. No hidden telemetry.
- Claw: A deliberate nod to its heritage—the same irreverent, resilient, slightly absurd lobster that’s become a cult icon across GitHub, Discord, and meme feeds.
As the team put it: “The lobster has finally molted into its final form.”
⚡ Why Everyone’s Obsessing Over It (Spoiler: It Actually Works)
Forget demo reels and vaporware promises. OpenClaw is shipping real utility—today. And the numbers speak loudly:
- ✅ 100,000+ GitHub stars—reached in under 3 months
- ✅ 2 million+ website visits in a single week
- ✅ Zero data leaves your machine: Your emails, calendar invites, Slack DMs, WhatsApp chats—they all stay yours, processed locally or on your own server
How? By turning everyday chat apps into powerful AI interfaces. With OpenClaw, you don’t “log in to an AI”—you text your assistant on WhatsApp to clear your inbox, ask Discord to book a meeting, or tell Teams to check flight status before your gate changes. It’s not sci-fi. It’s your laptop, your rules, and a lobster holding the keys.
🔧 Under the Hood: Power, Flexibility, and (Yes) Real Security Work
OpenClaw isn’t just another wrapper—it’s a modular, OS-agnostic AI agent platform built for developers and power users:
- Multi-model, multi-provider: Now supports KIMI K2.5, Xiaomi MiMo-V2-Flash, and growing—plus native integrations with Ollama, LM Studio, and more
- New plugins live: Twitch alerts + Google Chat support just dropped
- Web UI upgrade: Send images directly in the browser-based chat—no CLI required
- Security-first ethos: 34 consecutive security patches shipped, including a machine-readable safety model and transparent prompt-hardening guides (yes, prompt injection remains thorny—but they’re documenting how they’re fighting it)
And unlike many viral OSS projects, OpenClaw is investing in sustainability: formal PR triage workflows, contributor onboarding docs, and active exploration of paid maintainer roles—because great tools shouldn’t rely on burnout.
🌐 Beyond “Me”: From Solo User to Team Infrastructure
Despite early turbulence—including a hijacked GitHub account and copycat crypto scams—the project’s core philosophy has held strong: privacy isn’t a feature—it’s the foundation.
That clarity has resonated deeply. Developers deploy it as a family scheduler. Remote teams use it to auto-summarize standups. Indie devs embed it into internal tooling. As the team writes in their latest blog post:
“OpenClaw starts personal—but scales intentionally. Your home office. Your startup’s ops channel. Your engineering team’s incident bot. All on your terms.”
The roadmap is clear: harden the gateway layer, add enterprise-grade auth options, onboard more frontier models—and keep the lobster mascot firmly, proudly, untrademarkably theirs.
Ready to meet your new assistant?
🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw
🌐 Live demo & docs: https://openclaw.ai