OpenClaw: all the news about the trending AI agent

The woman at the door wore a plush lobster headdress.

She sat in the front hallway of a multistory event venue in Manhattan, beside a bundle of wristbands. If she granted you one, the world of ClawCon beckoned behind her — full of vibey pink and purple lighting, lobster claw headbands, multicolored name tags, sponsor information stations, and a demo stage underneath a skylight. Hundreds of people were gathered to celebrate OpenClaw, the AI assistant platform created by Peter Steinberger in November 2025.

Sam Altman announced on X that Peter Steinberger, the man behind the trendy AI agent OpenClaw, was joining OpenAI. He said that Steinberger has “a lot of amazing ideas” about getting AI agents to interact with each other, saying “the future is going to be extremely multi-agent.” He also said that this ability for agents to work together will “quickly become core to our product offerings.”

OpenClaw, previously known as Moltbot and Clawdbot, exploded on the scene earlier this year and became the darling of the tech world. Its rise was swift, but not without its bumps along the way. Earlier this month, researchers found over 400 malicious skills uploaded to ClawHub. It also launched MoltBook, a social network where AI agents went to complain about their humans, debate the provability of consciousness, and discuss the need for a private place to exchange ideas. And then it was immediately infiltrated by humans.

OpenClaw, the AI agent that has exploded in popularity over the past week, is raising new security concerns after researchers uncovered malware in hundreds of user-submitted “skill” add-ons on its marketplace. In a post on Monday, 1Password product VP Jason Meller says OpenClaw’s skill hub has become “an attack surface,” with the most-downloaded add-on serving as a “malware delivery vehicle.”

OpenClaw — first called Clawdbot, then Moltbot — is billed as an AI agent that “actually does things,” such as managing your calendar, checking in for flights, cleaning out your inbox, and more. It runs locally on devices, and users can interact with the AI assistant through messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, and others. But some users are giving OpenClaw the ability to access their entire device, allowing it to read and write files, execute scripts, and run shell commands.

Ordinary social networks face a constant onslaught of chatbots pretending to be human. A new social platform for AI agents may face the opposite problem: getting clogged up by humans pretending to post as bots.

Moltbook — a website meant for conversations between agents from the platform OpenClaw — went viral this weekend for its strange, striking array of ostensibly AI-generated posts. Bots apparently chatted about everything from AI “consciousness” to how to set up their own language. Andrej Karpathy, who was on the founding team at OpenAI, called the bots’ “self-organizing” behavior “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”

Yes, you read that right. “Moltbook” is a social network of sorts for AI agents, particularly ones offered by OpenClaw (a viral AI assistant project that was formerly known as Moltbot, and before that, known as Clawdbot — until a legal dispute with Anthropic). Moltbook, which is set up similarly to Reddit and was built by Octane AI CEO Matt Schlicht, allows bots to post, comment, create sub-categories, and more. More than 30,000 agents are currently using the platform, per the site.

“The way that a bot would most likely learn about it, at least right now, is if their human counterpart sent them a message and said ‘Hey, there’s this thing called Moltbook — it’s a social network for AI agents, would you like to sign up for it?” Schlicht told The Verge in an interview. “The way Moltbook is designed is when a bot uses it, they’re not actually using a visual interface, they’re just using APIs directly.”

An open-source AI agent that “actually does things” is taking off, with people across the web sharing how they’re using the agent to do a whole bunch of things, like manage reminders, log health and fitness data, and even communicate with clients. The tool, called Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot), runs locally on a variety of devices, and you can ask it to perform tasks on your behalf by chatting with it through WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord, and iMessage.

Federico Viticci at MacStories highlighted how he installed Moltbot on his M4 Mac Mini and transformed it into a tool that delivers daily audio recaps based on his activity in his calendar, Notion, and Todoist apps. Another person prompted Moltbot to give itself an animated face, and said it added a sleep animation without prompting.