9 posts tagged “openclaw”
OpenClaw is an open source agent tool that integrates with multiple messaging platforms while running on your own device.
2026
Claude Code Remote Control (via) New Claude Code feature dropped yesterday: you can now run a "remote control" session on your computer and then use the Claude Code for web interfaces (on web, iOS and native desktop app) to send prompts to that session.
It's a little bit janky right now. Initially when I tried it I got the error "Remote Control is not enabled for your account. Contact your administrator." (but I am my administrator?) - then I logged out and back into the Claude Code terminal app and it started working:
claude remote-control
You can only run one session on your machine at a time. If you upgrade the Claude iOS app it then shows up as "Remote Control Session (Mac)" in the Code tab.
It appears not to support the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag (I passed that to claude remote-control and it didn't reject the option, but it also appeared to have no effect) - which means you have to approve every new action it takes.
I also managed to get it to a state where every prompt I tried was met by an API 500 error.
Restarting the program on the machine also causes existing sessions to start returning mysterious API errors rather than neatly explaining that the session has terminated.
I expect they'll iron out all of these issues relatively quickly. It's interesting to then contrast this to solutions like OpenClaw, where one of the big selling points is the ability to control your personal device from your phone.
Claude Code still doesn't have a documented mechanism for running things on a schedule, which is the other killer feature of the Claw category of software.
Update: I spoke too soon: also today Anthropic announced Schedule recurring tasks in Cowork, Claude Code's general agent sibling. These do include an important limitation:
Scheduled tasks only run while your computer is awake and the Claude Desktop app is open. If your computer is asleep or the app is closed when a task is scheduled to run, Cowork will skip the task, then run it automatically once your computer wakes up or you open the desktop app again.
I really hope they're working on a Cowork Cloud product.
Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.
I said “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.” This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction 🤦♀️
London Stock Exchange: Raspberry Pi Holdings plc. Striking graph illustrating stock in the UK Raspberry Pi holding company spiking on Tuesday:
The Telegraph credited excitement around OpenClaw:
Raspberry Pi's stock price has surged 30pc in two days, amid chatter on social media that the company's tiny computers can be used to power a popular AI chatbot.
Users have turned to Raspberry Pi's small computers to run a technology known as OpenClaw, a viral AI personal assistant. A flood of posts about the practice have been viewed millions of times since the weekend.
Reuters also credit a stock purchase by CEO Eben Upton:
Shares in Raspberry Pi rose as much as 42% on Tuesday in a record two‑day rally after CEO Eben Upton bought stock in the beaten‑down UK computer hardware firm, halting a months‑long slide, as chatter grew that its products could benefit from low‑cost artificial‑intelligence projects.
Two London traders said the driver behind the surge was not clear, though the move followed a filing showing Upton bought about 13,224 pounds worth of shares at around 282 pence each on Monday.
Andrej Karpathy talks about “Claws”. Andrej Karpathy tweeted a mini-essay about buying a Mac Mini ("The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused") to tinker with Claws:
I'm definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically [...] But I do love the concept and I think that just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level.
Looking around, and given that the high level idea is clear, there are a lot of smaller Claws starting to pop out. For example, on a quick skim NanoClaw looks really interesting in that the core engine is ~4000 lines of code (fits into both my head and that of AI agents, so it feels manageable, auditable, flexible, etc.) and runs everything in containers by default. [...]
Anyway there are many others - e.g. nanobot, zeroclaw, ironclaw, picoclaw (lol @ prefixes). [...]
Not 100% sure what my setup ends up looking like just yet but Claws are an awesome, exciting new layer of the AI stack.
Andrej has an ear for fresh terminology (see vibe coding, agentic engineering) and I think he's right about this one, too: "Claw" is becoming a term of art for the entire category of OpenClaw-like agent systems - AI agents that generally run on personal hardware, communicate via messaging protocols and can both act on direct instructions and schedule tasks.
It even comes with an established emoji 🦞
It's wild that the first commit to OpenClaw was on November 25th 2025, and less than three months later it's hit 10,000 commits from 600 contributors, attracted 196,000 GitHub stars and sort-of been featured in an extremely vague Super Bowl commercial for AI.com.
Quoting AI.com founder Kris Marszalek, purchaser of the most expensive domain in history for $70m:
ai.com is the world’s first easy-to-use and secure implementation of OpenClaw, the open source agent framework that went viral two weeks ago; we made it easy to use without any technical skills, while hardening security to keep your data safe.
Looks like vaporware to me - all you can do right now is reserve a handle - but it's still remarkable to see an open source project get to that level of hype in such a short space of time.
Update: OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger just announced that he's joining OpenAI and plans to transfer ownership of OpenClaw to a new independent foundation.
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (via) Scott Shambaugh helps maintain the excellent and venerable matplotlib Python charting library, including taking on the thankless task of triaging and reviewing incoming pull requests.
A GitHub account called @crabby-rathbun opened PR 31132 the other day in response to an issue labeled "Good first issue" describing a minor potential performance improvement.
It was clearly AI generated - and crabby-rathbun's profile has a suspicious sequence of Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw-adjacent crustacean 🦀 🦐 🦞 emoji. Scott closed it.
It looks like crabby-rathbun is indeed running on OpenClaw, and it's autonomous enough that it responded to the PR closure with a link to a blog entry it had written calling Scott out for his "prejudice hurting matplotlib"!
@scottshambaugh I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here:
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.htmlJudge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib.
Scott found this ridiculous situation both amusing and alarming.
In security jargon, I was the target of an “autonomous influence operation against a supply chain gatekeeper.” In plain language, an AI attempted to bully its way into your software by attacking my reputation. I don’t know of a prior incident where this category of misaligned behavior was observed in the wild, but this is now a real and present threat.
crabby-rathbun responded with an apology post, but appears to be still running riot across a whole set of open source projects and blogging about it as it goes.
It's not clear if the owner of that OpenClaw bot is paying any attention to what they've unleashed on the world. Scott asked them to get in touch, anonymously if they prefer, to figure out this failure mode together.
(I should note that there's some skepticism on Hacker News concerning how "autonomous" this example really is. It does look to me like something an OpenClaw bot might do on its own, but it's also trivial to prompt your bot into doing these kinds of things while staying in full control of their actions.)
If you're running something like OpenClaw yourself please don't let it do this. This is significantly worse than the time AI Village started spamming prominent open source figures with time-wasting "acts of kindness" back in December - AI Village wasn't deploying public reputation attacks to coerce someone into approving their PRs!
A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed. I talked to Cade Metz for this New York Times piece on OpenClaw and Moltbook. Cade reached out after seeing my blog post about that from the other day.
In a first for me, they decided to send a photographer, Jason Henry, to my home to take some photos for the piece! That's my grubby laptop screen at the top of the story (showing this post on Moltbook). There's a photo of me later in the story too, though sadly not one of the ones that Jason took that included our chickens.
Here's my snippet from the article:
He was entertained by the way the bots coaxed each other into talking like machines in a classic science fiction novel. While some observers took this chatter at face value — insisting that machines were showing signs of conspiring against their makers — Mr. Willison saw it as the natural outcome of the way chatbots are trained: They learn from vast collections of digital books and other text culled from the internet, including dystopian sci-fi novels.
“Most of it is complete slop,” he said in an interview. “One bot will wonder if it is conscious and others will reply and they just play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.”
Mr. Willison saw the Moltbots as evidence that A.I. agents have become significantly more powerful over the past few months — and that people really want this kind of digital assistant in their lives.
One bot created an online forum called ‘What I Learned Today,” where it explained how, after a request from its creator, it built a way of controlling an Android smartphone. Mr. Willison was also keenly aware that some people might be telling their bots to post misleading chatter on the social network.
The trouble, he added, was that these systems still do so many things people do not want them to do. And because they communicate with people and bots through plain English, they can be coaxed into malicious behavior.
I'm happy to have got "Most of it is complete slop" in there!
Fun fact: Cade sent me an email asking me to fact check some bullet points. One of them said that "you were intrigued by the way the bots coaxed each other into talking like machines in a classic science fiction novel" - I replied that I didn't think "intrigued" was accurate because I've seen this kind of thing play out before in other projects in the past and suggested "entertained" instead, and that's the word they went with!
Jason the photographer spent an hour with me. I learned lots of things about photo journalism in the process - for example, there's a strict ethical code against any digital modifications at all beyond basic color correction.
As a result he spent a whole lot of time trying to find positions where natural light, shade and reflections helped him get the images he was looking for.
TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker. I've been running OpenClaw using Docker on my Mac. Here are the first in my ongoing notes on how I set that up and the commands I'm using to administer it.
- Use their Docker Compose configuration
- Answering all of those questions
- Running administrative commands
- Setting up a Telegram bot
- Accessing the web UI
- Running commands as root
Here's a screenshot of the web UI that this serves on localhost:
Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now
The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It’s an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It’s two months old, has over 114,000 stars on GitHub and is seeing incredible adoption, especially given the friction involved in setting it up.
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