OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again

Summary

Two months ago, I hacked together a weekend project. What started as “WhatsApp Relay” now has over 100,000 GitHub stars and drew 2 million visitors in a single week. Today, I’m excited to announce our new name: OpenClaw. The Naming Journey We’ve been through some names. Clawd was born in November 2025—a playful pun on “Claude” with a claw. It felt perfect until Anthropic’s legal team politely asked us to reconsider. Fair enough. Moltbot came next, chosen in a chaotic 5am Discord brainstorm with the community. Molting represents growth - lobsters shed their shells to become something bigger. It was meaningful, but it never quite rolled off the tongue. OpenClaw is where we land. And this time, we did our homework: trademark searches came back clear, domains have been purchased, migration code has been written. The name captures what this project has become: Open: Open source, open to everyone, community-driven Claw: Our lobster heritage, a nod to where we came from What OpenClaw Is OpenClaw is an open agent platform that runs on your machine and works from the chat apps you already use. WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Teams—wherever you are, your AI assistant follows. Your assistant. Your machine. Your rules. Unlike SaaS assistants where your data lives on someone else’s servers, OpenClaw runs where you choose—laptop, homelab, or VPS. Your infrastructure. Your keys. Your data. What’s New in This Release Along with the rebrand, we’re shipping: New Channels: Twitch and Google Chat plugins Models: Support for KIMI K2.5 & Xiaomi MiMo-V2-Flash Web Chat: Send images just like you can in messaging apps Security: 34 security-related commits to harden the codebase I’d like to thank all security folks for their hard work in helping us harden the project. We’ve released machine-checkable security models this week and are continuing to work on additional security improvements. Remember that prompt injection is still an industry-wide unsolved problem, so it’s important to use ...