#491 – OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet – Peter Steinberger

The following is a conversation with Peter Steinberger, creator of Openclaw, formerly known as Moldbot, Claudbot, Claudus, Claude, spelled with a W, as in lobster claw. Not to be confused with Claude, the AI model from anthropic, spelled with a U. In fact, This confusion is the reason Anthropic kindly asked Peter to change the name to Openclaw. So, what is OpenClaw?

It's an open source AI agent that has taken over the tech world in a matter of days, exploding in popularity, reaching over one hundred and eighty thousand stars on GitHub, and spawning the social network moldbook where AI agents post manifestos and debate consciousness, creating a mix of excitement and fear in the general public, in a kind of AI psychosis, a mix of clickbait fearmongering and genuine, fully justifiable concern about the role of AI in our digital interconnected human world. OpenClaw, as this tagline states, is the AI that actually does things. It's an autonomous AI assistant that lives on your computer, has access to all of your stuff if you let it, talks to you through Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and whatever else messaging client, uses whatever AI model you like, including Cloud Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 codex. all to do stuff for you.

Many people are calling this one of the biggest moments in the recent history of AI since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. The ingredients for this kind of AI agent were all there, but putting it all together in a system that definitively takes a step forward over the line from language to agency, from ideas to actions, in a way that created a useful assistant that feels like one who gets you and learns from you in an open source community driven way is the reason OpenClaw took the internet by storm. Its power, in large part, comes from the fact that you can give it access to all of your stuff and give it permission to do anything with that stuff in order to be useful to you.

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