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.
