#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, clawedbot, clawedus, clawed, 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 180,000 stars on GitHub and spawning the social network mold book 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 fear mongering and genuine fully justifiable concern about the role of AI in our digital interconnected human world. OpenClaw, as its tagline states, is the AI that actually does things. It's an autonomous AI assistant that lives in 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 CloudOpus 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. This is very powerful, but it is also dangerous. OpenClaw represents freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility. With it, you can own and have control over your data. But precisely because you have this control, you also have the responsibility to protect it from cybersecurity threats of various kinds. There are great ways to protect yourself, but the threats and vulnerabilities are out there. Again, a powerful AI agent with system level access is a security minefield, but it also represents the future. Because when done well and securely, it can be extremely useful to each of us humans as a personal assistant. We discuss all of this with Peter and also discuss his big picture programming and entrepreneurship life story, which I think is truly inspiring. He spent thirteen years building PSPDF kit, which is a software used on a billion devices. He sold it and, for a brief time, fell out of love with programming, vanished for three …