The lobster sheds its shell for the third time as Clawdbot becomes OpenClaw

The viral open-source AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot on 30 January changed its name again, rebranding itself as OpenClaw after weeks of rapid growth and earlier trademark concerns raised by Anthropic.

The platform announced the move in a post on X, saying, “The lobster has molted into its final form,” outlining its journey from Clawd to Moltbot and now OpenClaw.

The project has crossed more than 100,000 GitHub stars and attracted about 2 million visitors in a single week, highlighting the speed at which it has gained traction among developers and AI enthusiasts.

Creator Peter Steinberger said the project began just two months ago as a small experiment. “Two months ago, I hacked together a weekend project. What started as ‘WhatsApp Relay’ now has over 100,000 GitHub stars and drew 2 million visitors in a single week,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the rebrand.

Steinberger detailed the project’s unusual naming journey, saying, “Clawd was born in November 2025—a playful pun on ‘Claude’ with a claw. It felt perfect until Anthropic’s legal team politely asked us to reconsider.” Moltbot followed after a community brainstorm, but Steinberger said, “It was meaningful, but it never quite rolled off the tongue.”

“OpenClaw is where we land,” he wrote, adding that trademark searches had cleared and domains had been secured. “The name captures what this project has become: Open: Open source, open to everyone, community-driven. Claw: Our lobster heritage, a nod to where we came from.”

OpenClaw allows users to run AI agents locally on their own machines and access them through familiar chat platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack and Microsoft Teams. Steinberger described it as “an open agent platform that runs on your machine and works from the chat apps you already use.”

Unlike cloud-based assistants, he said, “Your assistant. Your machine. Your rules,” adding that OpenClaw runs on user-controlled infrastructure such as laptops, home servers or virtual private servers.

Agentic AI has been one of the industry’s biggest ambitions. Many companies predicted 2025 would be the year these systems became mainstream. So far, most high-profile attempts have struggled.

The rebrand also comes with product updates, including new Twitch and Google Chat integrations, support for additional models, image uploads via web chat and dozens of security-related code changes. Steinberger said “we’re shipping” new features alongside “34 security-related commits to harden the codebase.”

The project’s rapid rise has not been without challenges. Earlier this month, Steinberger said its GitHub page was briefly targeted by crypto scammers.

Looking ahead, Steinberger said security remains the top priority, alongside improving reliability and expanding model support. He added that the project has grown beyond what he can manage alone, noting that maintainers are being added and processes set up to handle the surge in contributions. “This project has grown far beyond what I could maintain alone,” he wrote.