Now on its third name, this agent can take actions without you having to prompt it and make those decisions by accessing large swaths of your digital life.
UPDATE 1/30: Third time’s the charm? Moltbot (previously Clawdbot) got yet another name change overnight and is now known as OpenClaw.
Moltbot was « chosen in a chaotic 5am Discord brainstorm with the community », says creator Pete Steinberger, « but it never quite rolled off the tongue. » So, it’s going with OpenClaw. « 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. »
Original Story 1/28:
AI agents are hit or miss, but a lobster-inspired assistant has piqued the interest of developers and vibe coders alike to become the internet’s latest AI obsession. Initially known as Clawdbot, it’s now Moltbot following a complaint from Anthropic over similarities in name to its Claude AI.
It’s not particularly common for an open-source AI tool to go viral, given its fairly niche audience and the technical know-how required to set it up on GitHub. So, this one caught our attention.
Moltbot is free to download, but it’ll cost about $3–$5 per month to run on a basic Virtual Private Server (VPS). Some people have had success setting it up on AWS’s free tier.
