"A new viral AI personal assistant will handle your email inbox, trade away your entire stock portfolio and text your wife good morning and goodnight on your behalf. OpenClaw, formerly known as Moltbot, and before that known as Clawdbot (until the AI firm Anthropic requested it rebrand due to similarities with its own product Claude), bills itself as the AI that actually does things: a personal assistant that takes instructions via messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram."
"Developed last November, it now has nearly 600,000 downloads and has gone viral among a niche ecosystem of the AI obsessed who say it represents a step change in the capabilities of AI agents, or even an AGI moment that is, a revelation of generally intelligent AI. It only does exactly what you tell it to do and exactly what you give it access to,"
"AI agents have been the talk of the very-online for nearly a month, after Anthropic's AI tool Claude Code went mainstream, setting off a flurry of reporting on how AI can finally independently accomplish practical tasks such as booking theatre tickets or building a website, without at least so far deleting an entire company's database or hallucinating users' calendar meetings, as the less advanced AI agents of 2025 were known to do at times."
OpenClaw is an autonomous messaging-based personal assistant that executes user instructions through apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. The tool has rebranded multiple times and now reportedly has nearly 600,000 downloads and rapid uptake among a niche AI-focused community. The assistant layers on top of large language models such as Claude or ChatGPT and can operate with varying autonomy depending on granted permissions. Users report it performing high-impact actions, including bulk email deletion and portfolio trading, with minimal input. The combination of viral interest, broad permissions, and autonomous operation raises significant practical and safety concerns about unintended or harmful actions.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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