OpenClaw
Open-source personal AI agent that acts through your messaging apps.
About
OpenClaw is an open-source, self-hosted personal AI assistant created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, founder of PSPDFKit. A local Gateway process sits between the model and your everyday channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and Discord: you send it a message and it does the work, reading and writing files, sending messages, browsing the web, executing scripts, and calling APIs, with history and tool state staying on your own infrastructure.\n\nThe project went through a whirlwind naming journey, released in November 2025 as Warelay, then renamed Clawdbot, then Moltbot after a trademark dispute, and finally OpenClaw in January 2026. It became the fastest-growing project in GitHub history with hundreds of thousands of stars, and in February 2026 Steinberger joined OpenAI while the project moved to the independent OpenClaw Foundation, which keeps the code MIT licensed. Security researchers have flagged risks around exposed dashboards and prompt injection in its deep system access, so self-hosters need to harden their setup.
What it can do
- Personal agent that takes real actions through WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and more
- Local gateway keeping conversation history and tool state on your hardware
- Plugin installs and teams of specialist agents in recent releases
- MIT licensed code stewarded by an independent nonprofit foundation
- Companion mobile apps that connect back to your gateway
Setup
Install the gateway on your own machine or server, connect an LLM provider API key, and pair your messaging channels.
Prerequisites
A computer you control to run the gateway plus an LLM provider API key.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 100; Trending score 88/100 from researcher assessment.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.