What's OpenClaw?

I've been programming

since I was 14.

Building software felt like

playing a video game.

I couldn't stop

until I did.

I created a company.

I poured a decade

of my life into it.

No venture capital.

Every weekend.

And then I sold the dream.

And I felt absolutely nothing.

For 3 years

I was wondering

did therapy

traveled

I changed countries twice.

Nothing nothing clicked.

You know, I wake up every morning

with everything I was supposed to want

and no reason

no reason to get out of bed.

And then

in early 2025 I

I tried an experiment. I wanted to see

what these new AI coding agents are all

about.

And I had

what I can only describe as a

holy moment.

The boiler plates, the plumbing, all the

boring parts

that was

software development, AI could do all of

it.

The bottleneck is no longer typing.

It's thinking.

And thinking was the part

I did 25 years.

Building software

felt like playing a video game again.

I was back.

I built 44

projects

in just a few months.

And the latest one

was a WhatsApp bot.

I put it on my computer.

It talks through the apps

that you already know.

And then I took it on a trip

to Marrakech.

You know,

just to navigate around, to find

restaurants do translations.

And at first it

it didn't really feel right. It it it

felt too much like a tool.

Not like a friend.

You know, too many bullet points, too

many tables.

So I told it

cuz those modern models, they are so

smart. They know what WhatsApp is. They

know how people talk. I just had to tell

it.

And then it

it felt right.

And you know how you talk to friends at

some point I was walking around

and I was sending it a voice message.

And then I I sta- I froze because I

actually I didn't build

voice in there. I had a support for

images, yeah, but even that took hours.

So

I was looking at the typing indicator

and then the agent responded.

And I I very vividly remember this

situation. I was standing there and I

was like

how did you do that?

And the agent replied, I'm not kidding

you, the mad lad figured it out on its

own.

And then it it walked me through every

single step. How it got a message from

me, but there was no file ending, so it

inspected the file, it found that it was

audio, but a weird format, so it

converted it, and then it was looking

for for something to translate

the audio, but I didn't had it

installed, but then it found an OpenAI

key, it sent the whole thing to the

server, it got it back, and then it

replied.

All of that in 9 seconds.

Can you imagine? I didn't build any of

that.

For me this was the moment where I

thought

this is something new. This is not a

chatbot. Chatbots give up.

Agents

improvise.

And you know, I was sold. I wanted to

share this. I wanted to like tell people

on Twitter.

And nobody nobody really got it. It's

like

it's almost like

you have to experience an agent. It's

it's it's kind of hard to explain.

Took me a few weeks.

And then I did something stupid.

And you

remember

this agent by default can do anything

that you can do on your computer.

So obviously I put it in a public

Discord and I invited random people.

And

I was looking at it the whole night.

People were talking with it. People were

having fun with it. People tried to hack

it.

And then my eyes were like

falling off almost.

I exited the process

and I went to bed.

Though I forgot I built a system to be

resilient.

So while I was walking to the bedroom,

the agent happily booted up again

and talked to everyone in the world.

The next morning I woke up

over 800 messages.

I panicked.

I pulled the plug. I read every single

message

just to see if the agent leaked my

private life.

Nothing happened.

But it could have.

But that was the moment where it went

viral.

Today the project is called OpenClaw.

It's pretty much the fastest growing

open source project.

Its mascot is a lobster.

It claws into your machine.

Jensen Huang

calls it the operating system for

personal AI.

But by far my favorite quote is from a

friend who looked at the statistic and

said, Peter

this is not hockey stick growth.

This is stripper pole.

And I

I was not ready. You know when something

blows up like this

everything explodes.

Hundreds of messages.

Reporters calling me in the middle of

the night.

Security vulnerabilities.

And then

the AI company whose model most of my

users loved sent me a trademark claim. I

had to rename the whole thing while it

was taking off.

You know,

they even tried

to push me away from the lobster.

Like I was staring at the message. I was

like, it's not even the same animal.

And then they also cut off the the model

most of my users loved.

You know,

first the name

then the lobster

then the model.

I was that close of just deleting the

whole thing.

But then

I learned what people are building with

it.

So at ClawCon in Vienna, because yes, we

have conferences already

and people wear lobster headbands

I met Stefan

and his 60-year year old dad Gerhard

a beer sommelier

who never wrote a single line of code.

They connected OpenClaw via Bluetooth

sent it one prompt and the agent did the

whole 90-minute brew. Temperature ramps,

hop additions, everything.

And then they were like

what are we doing with all this beer?

And the agent was let's make a website.

So they built a website and then they

added payments and now they have a real

product.

And almost all of it was just done

via the phone.

In China

installing OpenClaw is called raising

lobsters.

Thousands of people were lining up at

the Tencent office in Shenzhen to get

their lobster installed.

Shenzhen even gives out subsidies for

people running businesses on OpenClaw.

Now

if you install OpenClaw on your work

machine

at least with the default settings, you

might get fired.

And then I met

an entrepreneur in China who showed me a

spreadsheet.

Every employee

every day one task automated by

OpenClaw.

If you miss too many days, you're fired.

So fired

for using it.

Fired for not using it.

After Marrakech

I thought

this is incredible.

And it's also a little bit scary.

How can we make it more scary?

So I added a new feature, a heartbeat.

You know, by default the agent would

only wake up when you send it a prompt.

With the heartbeat,

the agent would just wake up

periodically,

check your emails, check your calendar,

follow up on loose ends.

My initial prompt was simply,

"Surprise me."

And yes,

that's kind of as scary as it sounds.

So, no large company would ship

something like that.

But I'm a random builder from Austria. I

don't have a legal department.

I built

this sandbox, this sandcastle, for me,

and I made it open source, so other

people could play with it, and other

people could

raise their imagination.

Imagine

putting an agent into a meeting. Not not

for notes. We we figured that out.

A bidirectional model that can listen

and hear at the same time.

Somebody mentions a statistic, a sub

agent can spin off and check it for you.

A decision is made, the agent can send a

follow-up before the meeting even ends.

In the future,

we're not just going to have

one agent.

You might have your work agent, your

personal claw, maybe one for health,

maybe one for relationship.

And they all should work together in a

secure way.

Because

how did humanity level up? By

specializing and collaborating. And

agents are about to do the same.

Imagine a company,

a small business,

that has 10 agents that all specialized

taking over various parts of the

business.

We don't even have a name for what it

might become, but we're about to find

out.

So, I

created the Open Claw Foundation. A

non-profit, open source, forever.

Because what Open Claw did for many

people was it moved AI from this

scary,

nebulous thing

into something that is

that is fun

and useful, and maybe a bit weird, you

know, lobsters and headbands and beer

businesses.

Because what we need in the future is

more people

spending more time with the AI to better

understand how powerful and

transformative this technology really

is.

In New York,

at ClawCon,

yes, they're everywhere now.

There were thousands of people

that were discussing

what their lobster did this week.

A vet in

Shenzhen who automated

their groceries.

A teenager in São Paulo who built a

tutoring business on Open Claw.

Gerhard and his beer machine.

None of them are programmers.

All of them

are builders.

Because that's the real

transformation. It's not the technology,

it's the access. Agents change who can

build things, and that door is not

closing again.

Because when you can prompt

a prototype into existence into one in 1

hour,

anything is possible.

The next breakthrough can come from

anyone,

any country,

any cafe.

When even a

a burnt-out founder

staring at the screen,

wondering

if his spark is gone,

can do something like that.

It's not gone.

It's just waiting.

The lobster is loose,

and it's not going back into the tank.

Thank you very much.

[applause]

[applause]

Come come here. I

I mean,

I think I I want to say something

personal to you.

With love,

uh but truth.

You really terrify me.

I'm I'm I'm serious. If Hollywood was to

ever make a movie in which humanity

opened Pandora's Box and everything went

crazy, but you seriously could be cast

as the star character.

[laughter]

Because because because the story we're

told is that AI researchers are doing

all this great stuff, but they, you

know, they're taking all these great

efforts to ensure safety and make sure

nothing bad could happen. You

take glee in seeing what might happen if

you just put it out there. Like, is is

any part of you

feeling that that's that's a little bit

reckless?

I wouldn't I wouldn't say so. I see my

work as a

I see it as a window to the future.

Like,

in the very beginning,

there were all these scary moments.

Now we have proper security layers. You

can have your sandbox, you can

you can put your lobster into a very

small, tiny box and really control what

it can do. Um there's still some issues

that we need to figure out, but the fact

that so many people want this now

will help to figure this out much

faster.

So, I'm I'm glad you mentioned the

security less. The um

I mean, you're making a huge bet on

human

ingenuity using the this incredible tool

that suddenly can maximize the power of

what any human can do.

Um

Is is that How How many people in your

community are taking the safety issue

seriously and want to use Open Claw, for

example, to find smarter ways than just

checking whether anything might be going

wrong and giving an early

alarm to someone or something like that?

people are not as reckless of number

one, putting it into a public discord.

Strongly don't recommend.

Number two,

uh I think I single-handedly increased

Mac mini sales by multiple percent.

So, most people give it give it their

own little Mac mini. Mine's a little

princess. Mine got a Mac Studio. Calls

it the castle.

And that greatly reduces the actual

risk, because it can only access what's

on that computer, and maybe all your

pictures are not there.

Well, definitely if humanity goes down,

I'll be very grateful for at least the

rise in Mac mini sales.

[laughter]

A very tall You You are amazing. You are

amazing, and I I think I think I think

you're actually right at the cutting

edge of of whether AI is going to be the

biggest boon ever or possibly a serious

problem. And you know, I hope you

continue conversations with people here,

and and just help help us get smarter on

how to do this the right way. Cuz it is

absolutely incredible what you've built.

Thank you for sharing so honestly. Thank

you.

[applause]