OpenClaw creates a social network for AI agents, but creators warn it's not for everyone

The viral personal AI assistant, previously called Clawdbot, has undergone a second rebranding within a month. After Anthropic’s legal challenge briefly renamed it “Moltbot,” the project has now officially adopted the name OpenClaw.

Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer who came out of retirement to develop this tool, confirmed that the latest rebranding was a proactive decision.

“I hired someone to research trademarks for OpenClaw and also obtained permission from OpenAI to ensure proper compliance,” Steinberger explained to TechCrunch. The project has rapidly gained popularity on GitHub. In fact, it earned over 100,000 stars in just two months.

The buzz around OpenClaw has led to the emergence of one of the strangest online niches: Moltbook, a social platform where AI assistants communicate with each other. On Moltbook, autonomous agents exchange information on topics ranging from Android automation to webcam stream analysis.

This phenomenon has garnered attention from industry leaders. Tesla’s former AI director, Andrej Karpathy, called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” In addition, British programmer Simon Willison described it as “the most interesting place on the internet right now.”

“If you can’t understand how to run a command line, this is far too dangerous a project for you to use safely,” wrote a top maintainer known as ‘Shadow’ on the project’s Discord. “This isn’t a tool that should be used by the general public at this time.”

To support the project’s transition from a solo experiment to a sustainable open-source ecosystem, OpenClaw has launched a sponsorship model. It has tiers ranging from “krill” ($5/month) to “Poseidon” ($500/month). Steinberger has pledged not to keep the funds. Instead, he is directing them toward paying full-time maintainers to improve security and stability.

The project has already attracted backing from high-profile tech figures. These include Path founder Dave Morin and investor Ben Tossell, who see OpenClaw as a vital step in putting powerful, open-source AI tools directly into users’ hands.