While following OpenClaw, I noticed an unexpected resentment in myself. After some introspection, I realized it’s tied to seeing a project achieve huge success while ignoring security norms many of us struggled to learn the hard way. On one level, it’s selfish discomfort at the feeling of being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”). On another level, it feels genuinely sad that the culture of enforcing security norms - work that has no direct personal reward and that end users will never consciously appreciate, but that only builders can uphold - seems to be on it’s way out
I think you should give your gut instinct more credit. The tech world has gotten a false sense of security from the big SaaS platforms running everything that make the nitty gritty security details disappear in a seamless user experience, and that includes LLM chatbot providers. Even open source development libraries with exposure to the wild are so heavily scrutinized and well-honed that it’s easy even for people like me that started in the 90s to lose sight of the real risk on the other side that. No more popping up some raw script on an Apache server to do its best against whatever is out there. Vibe coded projects trade a lot of that hard-won stability for the convenience of not having to consider some amount of the implementation details. People that are jumping all over this for anything except sandbox usage either don’t know any better, or forgot what they’ve learned.
But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw. Releasing vulnerable software that users run on their own machines isn't going to compromise OpenClaw itself. It can still deliver value for it's users while also requiring those same users to handle the insecurity of the software themselves (by either ignoring it or setting up sandboxes, etc to reduce the risk, and then maybe that reduced risk is weighed against the novelty and value of the software that then makes it worth it to the user to setup).
On the other hand, if OpenClaw were structured as a SaaS, this entire project would have burned to the ground the first day it was launched.
So by releasing it as something you needed to run on your own hardware, the security requirement was reduced from essential, to a feature that some users would be happy to live without. If you were developing a competitor, security could be one feature you compete on--and it would increase the number of people willing to run your software and reduce the friction of setting up sandboxes/VMs to run it.
This argument has the same obvious flaws as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement (which unfortunately means there will always be a fringe that don't care). These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility".
I don't need to think hard to speculate on what might go wrong here - will it answer spam emails sincerely? Start cancelling flights for you by accident? Send nuisance emails to notable software developers for their contribution to society[1]? Start opening unsolicited PRs on matplotlib?
At least during the Covid response, your concerns over anti-mask and anti-vaccine issues seem unwarranted.
The claims being shared by officials at the time was that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it. Claims were similarly made that we needed roughly 60% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. With that precedent being set it shouldn't matter whether one person chose not to mask up or get the jab, most everyone else could do so to fully protect themselves and those who can't would only be at risk if more than 40% of the population weren't onboard with the masking and vaccination protocols.
I specifically wasn't referring to that instance (if anything I'm thinking more of the recent increase in measles outbreaks), I myself don't hold a strong view on COVID vaccinations. The trade-offs, and herd immunity thresholds, are different for different diseases.
Do we know that 0.1% prevalence of "unvaccinated" AI agents won't already be terrible?
More straightforwardly, people are generally very forgiving when people make mistakes, and very unforgiving when computers do. Look at how we view a person accidentally killing someone in a traffic accident versus when a robotaxi does it. Having people run it on their own hardware makes them take responsibility for it mentally, so gives a lot of leeway for errors.
Oh please, why equate IT BS with cancer? If the null pointer was a billion dollar mistake, then C was a trillion dollar invention.
At this scale of investment countries will have no problem cheapening the value of human life. It's part and parcel of living through another industrial revolution.
This is the genius move at the core of the phenomenon.
While everyone else was busy trying to address safety problems, the OpenClaw project took the opposite approach: They advertised it as dangerous and said only experienced power users should use it. This warning seemingly only made it more enticing to a lot of users.
It’ve been fascinated by how well the project has just dodged and avoided any consequences for the problems it has introduced. When it was revealed that the #1 skill was malware masquerading as a Twitter integration I thought for sure there would be some reporting on the problems. The recent story about an OpenClaw bot publishing hit pieces seemed like another tipping point for journalists covering the story.
Though maybe this inflection point made it the most obvious time to jump off of the hype train and join one of the labs. It takes a while for journalists to sync up and decided to flip to negative coverage of a phenomenon after they cover the rise, but now it appears that the story has changed again before any narratives could build about the problems with OpenClaw.
Love passing off the externalities of security to the user, and then the second order externalities of an LLM that then blackmails people in the wild. Love how we just don’t care anymore.
Every single new tech industry thing has to learn security from scratch. It's always been that way. A significant number of people in tech just don't believe that there's anything to learn from history.
Change is fraught with chaos. I don't think exuberant trends are indicators of whether we'll still care about secure and high quality software in the long term. My bet is that we will.
> being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”).
I don't believe skimming diffs counts as being left behind. Survivor bias etc. Furthermore, people are going to get burned by this (already have been, but seemingly not enough) and a responsible mindset such as yours will be valued again.
Something that still up for grabs is figuring how how to do full agenetic in a responsible way. How do we bring the equivalent of skimming diffs to this?
i think your self reflection here is commendable. i agree on both counts.
i think the silver lining is that AI seems to be genuinely good at finding security issues and maybe further down the line enough to rely on it somewhat. the middle period we're entering right now is super scary.
we want all the value, security be damned, and have no way to know about issues we're introducing at this breakneck speed.
I don't know. It's more of a sharp tool like a web browser (also called a "user agent") - yes an inexperienced user can quickly get themselves into trouble without realizing it (in a browser or openclaw), yes the agent means it might even happen without you being there.
A security hole in a browser is an expected invariant not being upheld, like a vulnerability letting a remote attacker control your other programs, but it isn't a bug when a user falls for an online scam. What invariants are expected by anyone of "YOLO hey computer run my life for me thx"?
At the end of the day, he built something people want. That’s what really matters. OpenAI and Anthropic could not build it because of the security issues you point out. But people are using it and there is a need for it. Good on him for recognizing this and giving people what they want. We’re all adults and the users will be responsible for whatever issues they run into because of the lack of security around this project.
So my unsubstantiated conspiracy theory regarding Clawd/Molt/OpenClaw is that the hype was bought, probably by OpenAI. I find it too convenient that not long after the phrase “the AI bubble“ starts coming into common speech we see the emergence of a “viral” use case that all of the paid influencers on the Internet seem to converge on at the same time. At the end of the day piping AI output with tool access into a while loop is not revolutionary. The people who had been experimenting with these type of set ups back when LangChain was the hotness didn’t organically go viral because most people knew that giving a language model unrestricted access to your online presence or bank account is extremely reckless. The “I gave OpenClaw $100 and now I bought my second Lambo. Buy my ebook” stories don’t seem credible.
So don’t feel bad. Everything on the internet is fake.
building this openclaw thing that competes with openai using codex is against the openai terms of service, which say you can't use it to make stuff that competes with them. but they compete with everyone. by giving zero fucks (or just not reading the fine print), bro was rewarded by the dumb rule people for breaking the dumb rules. this happens over and over. there is a lesson here
Hey, as a security engineer in AI, I get where you're coming from.
But one thing to remember - our job is to figure out how to enable these amazing usecases while keeping the blast radius as low as possible.
Yes, OpenClaw ignores all security norms, but it's our job to figure out an architecture in which agents like these can have the autonomy they need to act, without harming the business too much.
So I would disagree our work is "on the way out", it's more valuable than ever. I feel blessed to be working in security in this era - there has never been a better time to be in security. Every business needs us to get these things working safely, lest they fall behind.
It's fulfilling work, because we are no longer a cost center. And these businesses are willing to pay - truly life changing money for security engineers in our niche.
I've been feeling this SO much lately, in many ways. In addition to security, just the feeling of spending decades learning to write clean code, valuing having a deep understanding of my codebase and tooling, thorough testing, maintainability, etc, etc. Now the industry is basically telling me "all that expertise is pointless, you should give it up, all that we care about it is a future of endless AI slop that nobody understands".
But in this case following security norms would be a mistake. The right thing to take away is that you shouldn't dogmatically follow norms. Sometimes it's better to just build things if there is very little risk
Nothing actually bad happened in this case and probably never will. Maybe some people have their crypto or identity stolen, but probably not a rate rate significantly higher than background (lots of people are using openclaw)
peter's claw is a lot more than just a wrapper around my slop.
i too had plenty of offers, but so far chose not to follow through with any of them, as i like my life as is.
also, peter is a good friend and gives plenty of credit. in fact, less credit would be nice, so i don't have to endure more vibeslopped issues and PRs going forward :)
The real gem inside OpenClaw is pi, the agent, created by
Mario Zechner. Pi is by far the best agent framework in the world. Most extensible, with the best primitives. .
Armin Ronacher , creator of flask , can go deep and make something like openclaw enterprise ready.
The value of Peter is in connecting the dots, thinking from users perspective, and bringing business perspective
The trio are friends and have together vibecoded vibetunnel.
Sam Altman, if you are reading this , get Mario and Armin today.
Damn. I just installed OpenClaw on my M2 Mac and hopped on a plane for our SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu. And Claw (that's the name of my new AI agent) kept me updated on my rebooking options and new terminal/gate assignments in SFO. All through the free WhatsApp access on United. AND, it refactored all my transferred Python code, built a graph of my emails, installed MariaDB and restored a backup from another PC. And, I almost forgot, fixed my 1337x web scrapping (don't ask) cron job, by CloudFlare-proofing it. All the while sitting in a shitty airline, with shitty food and shittier seats, hurtling across the pacific ocean.
The future is both amazing and shitty.
Hope OpenClaw continues to evolve. It is indeed an amazing piece of work.
And I hope sama doesn't get his grubby greedy hands on OpenClaw.
I asked it to check why the cron job kept failing, and it checked the cron payload and recommended reasons for the failure. I gave it the approval to go ahead and fix it. it tried different options (like trying different domains, and finally figured out the anti CF option).
> Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
Not gonna lie, that’s exactly the potential scenario I am personally excited for. Not due to any particular love for Anthropic, but because I expect this type of a tight competition to be very good for trying a lot of fresh new things and the subsequent discovery process of new ideas and what works.
Things that arn't happening any time soon but need to for actual product success built on top:
1. Stable models
2. Stable pre- and post- context management.
As long as they keep mothballing old models and their interderminant-indeterminancy changes, whatever you try to build on them today will be rugpulled tomorrow.
This is all before even enshittification can happen.
I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him.
There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.
For hardware, I'd only trust a company if they didn't also have an interest in data. In fact, I'd trust a hardware company more if they didn't also have a big software division.
A company like AMD I would trust more than a company like Apple.
No past history of shady planned-obsolescence sprinkled in a bunch of their products, for one.
So that rules out Apple.
A leadership team that is very open and involved with the community, and one that takes extra steps, compared to competitors, to show they take privacy seriously.
Decent management. A lack of change of business model, no rug pulls and such. Fair value for money. Consistency over the longer term. No lock in or other forced relationships. Large enough to be useful and to have decent team size, small enough to not have the illusion they'll conquer the world. Healthy competition.
Admirable, but short of a local credit union I used to use (which I am no longer with as they f'd up a rather critical transaction), I can scarcely imagine a business that fits such a model these days. The amount of transparency needed to vet this would be interesting to find though, and its mere presence probably a green flag.
We're no mondragon but I founded a co-op in IT space a few years back and it surprised me how open to the vision the members and customers have been.
I had assumed I'd have to lean more on the capitalistic values of being a co-op, like better rates for our clients, higher quality work, larger likelihood of our long term existence to support our work, more project ownership, so as to make the pitch palatable to clients. Turns out clients like the soft pitch too, of just workers owning the company they work within - I've had several clients make contact initially because they bought the vision over the sales pitch.
I'm trying to think about if I'd trust us more to set up or host openclaw than a VC funded startup or an establishment like Capital One. I think both alternatives would have way more resources at hand, but I'm not sure how that would help outside of hiring pentesters or security researchers. Our model would probably be something FOSS that is keyed per-user, so if we were popular, imo that would be more secure in the end.
The incentives leading to trust is definitely in a co-op's favor, since profit motive isn't our primary incentive - the growth of our members is, which isn't accomplished only through increasing the valuation of the co-op. Members also have total say in how we operate, including veto power, at every level of seniority, so if we started doing something naughty with customer data, someone else in the org could make us stop.
This is our co-op: 508.dev, but I've met a lot of others in the software space since founding it. I think co-ops in general have legs, the only problem is that it's basically impossible to fund them in a way a VC is happy with, so our only capitalization option is loans. So far that hasn't mattered, and that aligns with the goal of sustainable growth anyway.
Amazing, please write a book. My current venture is still called after that idea ("The Modular Company"), but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.
Co-operative will have significantly worse privacy guarantee compared to shareholder based model. In the no one company wants to sacrifice on privacy standard just for the sake of it. They do it for money. And in shareholder based model, the employees are more likely to go against the shareholder when user privacy is involved, because they are not directly benefiting from it.
That's nonsense. Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee: they can sell their shares to the highest bidder and walk away with 'clean hands' (or so they'll argue) whereas co-op partners violating your privacy would have to do so on their own title with immediate liability for their person.
It's going to be pretty short. Proton would be there for comms, for hosting related stuff I would trust Hetzner before any big US based cloud company. For the AI domain I wouldn't trust any of the big players, they're all just jockeying for position and want to achieve lock-in on a scale never seen before and they have all already shown they don't give a rats ass about where they get their training data and I expect that once they are in financial trouble they'll be happy to sell your private data down the river.
Effectively you can trust all of the companies out there right up until they are acquired and then you will regret all of the data you ever gave them. In that sense Facebook is unique: it was rotten from day #1.
Vehicles: anything made before 2005, SIM or e-SIM on board = no go.
I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now. Unfortunately you are now more or less forced to participate because your bank, your government and your social circle will push you back in. And I'm still pissed off that I'm not allowed to host any servers on a residential connection. That's not 'internet connectivity' that's 'consumer connectivity'.
why the (e)SIM cars concern? i ask since the data transmission (bidirectional) can be used to justify lower insurance rates, for an example, than without that data.
"Justifying lower insurance rates" is just algorithmic bias described from the perspective of someone it doesn't (currently) harm. See also: credit scoring, insurance claim acceptance, job applications, etc., etc.
You only get offered a discount if most other customers are being compelled to pay full (or even increased) prices for the same offering. Otherwise revenue goes down and company leadership finds itself finding other ways to cut costs and increase profits.
Proton complied with a court order once (that we know of), no? I have seen a lot of negative sentiment from HN commenters toward them but not a lot of evidence to back it up, particularly when you consider the email marketplace.
It was a legally mandated court order they couldn't just refuse. No encrypted data, the contents of their emails, was handed over. The person would've also been safe had they used vpn/tor as I recall the story.
Barely. Your points are well made and I'm sure that it is just a matter of time before they're just as untouchable as the rest. Hence the remark about mail. The Siloization of the internet is almost complete.
After reading Jacques's response to my question, my list got smaller. Personally, I still like Proton, but I get that they have made some people unhappy. I also agree that Hetzner is a reliable provider; I have used them a bunch of times in the last ten years.
Then my friend, we have to worry about fiber/network providers I suppose.
This general topic is outside my primary area of competence, so I just have a loose opinion of maintaining my own domain, use encryption, and being able switch between providers easily.
I would love to see an Ask HN on secure and private agentic infra + frameworks.
> There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and maybe Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I don't really understand what this has to do with the post or even OpenClaw. The big draw of OpenClaw (as I understand it) was that you could run it locally on your own system. Supposedly, per this post, OpenClaw is moving to a foundation and they've committed to letting the author continue working on it while on the OpenAI payroll. I doubt that, but it's a sign that they're making it explicitly not an OpenAI product.
OpenClaw's success and resulting PR hype explosion came from ignoring all of the trust and security guardrails that any big company would have to abide by. It would be a disaster of the highest order if it had been associated with any big company from the start. Because it felt like a grassroots experiment all of the extreme security problems were shifted to the users' responsibility.
It's going to be interesting to see where it goes from here. This blog post is already hinting that they're putting OpenClaw at arm's length by putting it into a foundation.
Sorry to break it to you but I would not trust any financial companies with my personal data. Simply because I’ve seen how they use data to build exploitive products in the past.
The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry.
Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).
Everyone is going to have their own flavor of Open Claw within 18 months. The memory architecture (and the general concept of the multi-tiered system) is open source. There's no moat to this kind of thing. But OpenAI is happy to trade his star power for money. And he might build something cool with suddenly unlimited resources. I don't blame the guy. OpenAI is going to change hands 2-3 times over the next 5 years but at the end of the day he will still have the money and equity OpenAI gave him. And his cool project will continue on.
I don't know the answer, but considering Meta (known for 100m+ offers) was in the rumors, and he mentions multiple labs (and many investors), and all the hype around openclaw ... I can easily see 9 figure, and would not be surprised by 1b+ "signing bonus", perhaps in the equivalent number of OpenAI shares.
... Why would they pay 9 figures? It's not like Openclaw required specialized PhD-level knowledge held by <1000 people in the world to build, and that's what Meta and the other AI labs are paying ludicrous salaries for. Openclaw is a cool project and demonstrates good product design in the AI world, but by no means is a great product manager worth 1 billion dollars.
> 1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter;
Again, Peter is a good/great AI product manager but I don't see any distinguishing skills worth a billion dollars there. There's only one Openclaw but it's also been a few weeks since it came into existence? Openclaw clones will exist soon enough, and the community is WAY too small to be worth anything (unlike, say, Instagram/Whatsapp before being acquired by Facebook)
> 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
True, but not worth $100 million dollars - $1 billion dollars
> 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
The people getting massive compensation offers from AI companies are all AI-adjacent PhDs or people with otherwise rare and specialized knowledge. This is unrelated to people who have massive compensation due to being at AI companies early. And if we're talking about the world in general, yes the best thing to do to be rich is own real estate and assets and extract rent, but that has nothing to do with this compensation offer
> 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
Investments have a probable ROI, what's the ROI on a product manager?
> 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw, it's extremely niche right now.
There are roughly 8.1 billion humans, so 99.999999% (8 nines) of the world is 81 people. There were way more than 81 people at the OpenClaw hackathon at the Frontier Tower in San Francisco, so at least that much of humanity has heard of OpenClaw. If we guess 810 people know about OpenClaw, then it means that 99.99999% (7 nines) of humanity have not heard of OpenClaw.
If we take it down to 6 nines, then that's roughly 8,100 people having heard of OpenClaw, and that 99.9999% of humanity has not.
So I think you're wrong when you say "99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw". I'd guess it's probably around 99.9999% to 99.9999999% that hasn't heard of it. Definitely not 99.999999% though.
Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares. See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better. To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
Technology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.
Except in this case there's no network effect for autonomous agents. In fact, Peter is going to be working mostly on an OpenAI locked down, ecosystem tied agent, which means it's going to be worse than OpenClaw, but with a nicer out of the box experience.
If you're on OpenAI, and I'm on Anthropic, can we interoperate? What level are we even trying to interoperate on? The network effect is that, hey, my stuff is working here, your stuff is working over there. So do we move to your set of tools, or my set of tools, or do we mismash between them, as our relationship and power dynamics choose for us.
It's kind of crazy that this kind of thing can cause so much hype. It is even useful? I just really don't see any utility in being able to access an LLM via Telegram or whatever.
A lot of the functionality I'm not using because of security concerns, but a lot of the magic comes down to just having a platform for orchestrating AI agents. It's honestly nice just for simple sysadmin stuff "run this cron job and text me a tl;dr if anything goes wrong" or simple personal assistant tasks like"remind me if anyone messaged me a question in the last 3 days and I haven't answered".
It's also cool having the ability to dispatch tasks to dumber agents running on the GPU vs smarter (but costlier) ones in the cloud
the ability to almost "discover" or create hype is highly valued despite most of the time it being luck and one hit wonders... See many of the apps that had virality and got quickly acquired and then just hemorrhaged. Openclaw is cool, but not for the tech, just some of the magic of the oddities and getting caught on somehow, and acquiring is betting that they can somehow keep doing that again.
I think a lot of this is orchestrated behind the scenes. Above author has taken money from AI companies since he’s a popular “influencer”.
And it makes a lot of sense - there’s billions of dollars on the line here and these companies made tech that is extremely good at imitating humans. Cambridge analytica was a thing before LLMs, this kinda tool is a wet dream for engineering sentiment.
In Asia people do a big chunk of their business via chatbots. OpenClaw is a security dumpster fire but something like OpenClaw but secure would turbocharge that use case.
If you give your agent a lot of quantified self data, that unlocks a lot of powerful autonomous behavior. Having your calendar, your business specific browsing history and relevant chat logs makes it easy to do meeting prep, "presearch" and so forth.
There's been some crypto shenanigans as well that the author claimed not to be behind... looking back at it, even if the author indeed wasn't behind it, I think the crypto bros hyping up his project ended up helping him out with this outcome in the end.
Wasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!
how is it a "startup" if all ip is open-source. Seems like openAi is just buying hype to keep riding their hype bubble a little longer, since they are in hot water on every other front (20Billion revenue vs 1 Trillion expenses and obligations, Sora 2 user retention dropping to 1% of users after 1 month of usage, dense competition, all actual real founding ml scientists having skipped the boat a long time ago).
It‘s just crazy to me that this guy lives around the corner. That should inspire some hope for me I guess, that even people from Vienna can be successful on such a level.
It’s not like Anthropic or OpenAI were not working on “AI assistants” before OpenClaw, it’s pretty much the endgame as I can see it. This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else. Although that’s impressive, I don’t see more than an acquisition of the hype by OpenAI.
My gut feeling is that OpenAI is desperately searching for The Killer App™ for LLMs and hired Peter to help guide them there.
OpenAI has tried a lot of experiments over the years - custom GPTs, the Orion browser, Codex, the Sora "TikTok but AI" app, and all have either been uninspired or more-or-less clones of other products (like Codex as a response to Claude Code).
OpenClaw feels compelling, fresh, sci-fi, and potentially a genuinely useful product once matured.
More to the point, OpenAI needs _some_ kind of hyper-compelling product to justify its insane hype, valuation, and investments, and Peter's work with OpenClaw seems very promising.
(All of this is complete speculation on my part. No insider knowledge or domain expertise here.)
In the AI space there isn’t a single killer app. EVERYTHING is open for disruption. ChatGPT was the start but OpenAI could create tons of other apps. They don’t need to wait for others to do so. People already want them to make a Slack replacement but I’m just wondering why none of the frontier labs are making a simple app platform that could be used to make custom apps like ChatGPT itself, or the Slack clone. Instead, they expect us to brute force app development through the API interface. Each frontier lab really needs their own Replit.
Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? That’s like the immediate use case for LLM-based app development.
This product should never have seen the light of day, at least not for the general public. The amount of slop that is now floating across Tiktok, YT Shorts and Instagram is insane. Whenever you see a "cute animals" video, 99% of it is AI generated - and you can report and report and report these channels over and over, and the platforms don't care at all, but instead reward the slop creators from all the comments shouting that this is AI garbage and people responding they don't care because "it's cute".
OpenAI completely lacks any sort of ethical review board, and now we're all suffering from it.
OpenAI has been running around headless for at least two years now. I've build systems like openclaw, based on email, at my day job and told OAI during an interview that they needed to build this or get smoked when someone else does. I guess aqi-hire is easier than building a team that can develop software internally.
> This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else.
It has been interesting to watch this take off. It wasn't the first or even best agent framework and it deliberately avoided all of the hard problems that others were trying to solve, like security.
What it did have was unnatural levels of hype and PR. A lot of that PR, ironically, came from all of the things that were happening because it had so many problems with security and so many examples of bad behavior. The chaos and lack of guardrails made it successful.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he piggybacked on a large company’s name recognition by originally calling it “clawd”, clearly intending it to be confused with Claude. I have my doubts it would have gone anywhere without that.
Twitter is negative in general, but generally when a project like this gets bought it marks the end of the project. The acquirer always says something about how they don't plan to change anything, but it rarely works that way.
(1) A capable independent developer is joining a large powerful corporation. I like it better when there are many small players in the scene rather than large players consolidating power.
(2) This seems like the celebration of Generative AI technology, which is often irresponsible and threatens many trust based social systems.
Obviously, all the people that disagree with your framing and see AI as the largest possible boost to mankind, giving us more assistance than ever.
From their standpoint, it's all the negativity that seems crazy. If you were against that, you'd have to have something wrong with you, in their view.
Hopefully most people can see both sides, though. And realize that in the end, probably the benefits will be slow but steady (no "singularity"), and also the dangers will develop slowly yet be manageable (no Skynet or economic collapse).
Imo Openclaw type AI has the most potential to benefit humans (automating drudgery while I own my data as opposed to creating gross simalcrums of human creativity). I suppose it's bad for human personal assistants, but I wouldn't pay for one of those regardless.
It already tried to use cancel culture to shame a human into accepting a PR. I wouldn't be surprised if someone gives their agent the ability to control a robot and someone gets injured or killed by it within the next few years
After two weeks of viral posts, articles, and Mac Mini buying sprees, as it's been happening up to now for every AI product that was not an LLM, it kinda disappeared from the consciousness-- as well as from the tooling, probably--of people.
A couple of months ago, Gemini 3 came out and it was "over" for the other LLM providers, "Google did it again!", said many, but after a couple of weeks, it was all "Claude code is the end of the software engineer".
It could be (and in large part, is) an exciting--and unprecedented in its speed--technological development, but it is also all so tiresome.
It took all of Peter’s time to move it forward, even with maintainers (who he complained got immediately hired by AI companies).
Now he’s gonna be working on other stuff at OpenAI, so OpenClaw will be dead real quick.
Also I was following him for his AI coding experience even before the whole OpenClaw thing, he’ll likely stop posting about his experiences working with AI as well
The guy already sold his previous company for a shitload of money. Got bored and did a side project that stirred the Internet on the past month. That is way more than most people here are going to accomplish in a lifetime. Yet, he has some deal with OpenAI to work on whatever he things exciting. I don't see why so much negative comments here other than jelously
True but between the lines I read some interesting points here.
Great it get the gold nugget but I found it curious how he dunked on the JVM after all the clones emerges with much more perfs and much less code/energy consumpution.
I just dislike Sam Altman, and I think he's just using this as a marketing ploy, which is more dishonesty from him. People keep saying OpenClaw is hype. I installed it, but I never tried to run it, and I don't know what the compelling reason is to. Supposedly you can talk to your agent from your iMessage? Who cares? Why not just talk to Claude Code?
The big draw of open claw is the memory architecture. Because you effectively start from scratch every time you open a new claude chat. Open Claw on the other hand, it compacts regularly, but also generates daily digests, and uses vector search, and then uses thoughtful memory retrieval techniques to add relevant context to your queries. Recent things get weighted more heavily, but full text search of all chats is still possible, and this is all managed automatically. Plus it uses markdown so the barrier to entry for manually auditing/modifying memories etc is very very low. If you say "can you check if my solar panel for my power generator arrive yet?" it is going to probably know what I'm talking about and go check my email for delivery notifications, based on conversations I've had with it about buying, ordering the solar panel etc. Claude is just going to ask clarifying questions since it has no idea what I am referencing.
I also not a Sam's fan for the same reason. But if he offered me a big check to work whatever project I wanted, I would not care about it being a "marketing ploy".
Regarding openclaw's hype, it is not about how you access it, but rather what the agents can access from you, and no one did that before. Probably because no one had the balls to put in the wild such unsecure piece of software
Unclear what this truly means for the open version.
We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.
Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?
(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)
It's kind of a shame actually, because the whole promise of OpenClaw is that you own all the data yourself, you have complete control, you can write the memories or the personality of the bot. "Open"AI will never run ChatGPT this way. They want all of your data, your documents, your calendar, they want to keep it for themselves and lock you into their platform. They will want a sanitised corporate friendly version of an AI agent that reflects well on their brand.
Just like the original OpenAI story, this seems like a case of reputation hacking through asymmetry in risk tolerance.
There is not much novel about OpenClaw. Anybody could have thought of this or done it. The reason people have not released an agent that would run by itself, edit its own code and be exposed to the internet is not that it's hard or novel - it's because it is an utterly reckless thing to do. No responsible corporate entity could afford to do it. So we needed someone with little enough to lose, enough skill and willing to be reckless enough to do it and release it openly to let everyone else absorb the risk.
I think he's smart to jump on the job opportunity here because it may well turn out that this goes south in a big way very fast.
I think it's at the final stage of software pump and dump [1]. OpenAI is probably hiring more for the reputation/marketing, rather than for any technical skills behind OpenClaw.
Potentially amazing opportunity for OpenAI to more meaningfully compete with Claude Code at the developer and hobbyist level. Based on vibes it sure seemed like Claude Code / Opus 4.6 was running away with developer mindshare.
Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.
Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.
Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)
> Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had.
Comments like this feel confusing because I didn't have any association between Codex and OpenClaw before reading your comment.
Codex was also seeing a lot of usage before OpenClaw.
The whole OpenClaw hype bubble feels like there's a world of social media that I wasn't tapped into last month that OpenClaw capitalized on with unparalleled precision. There are many other agent frameworks out there, but OpenClaw hit all the right notes to trigger the hype machine in a way that others did not. Now OpenClaw and its author are being attributed for so many other things that it's hard for me to understand how this one person inserted himself into the center of this media zeitgeist
He's been on a number of podcasts - lex recently, and is really emphatic about Codex as the breakthrough solution he relies on. I just looked and on the handful of podcasts there are about 2,000,000 views this past week and half or so.
It's how Steve Yegge became a "father of agentic orchestration" or something - there is some Canonical Universe Building exercise somewhere on twitter that just looks, for the lack of a better word, not rigorous. But good for all these people, I guess, for riding the hype to glory.
I’m not disputing that people who follow Peter are getting information from Peter. It’s the “single handedly” part of the claim that was strange.
I’m questioning how some people in that bubble came to believe he was at the center of that universe. He wasn’t the only person talking about the differences between Codex or Claude. Most of the LLM people I follow had their own thoughts and preferences that they advertised too.
Sure, single-handedly is doing a lot of work here. :) Anecdotally a fair number of people I know have referenced his thoughts so I just ran with that. Most people seem to kind of equivocate about whatever model they like, Peter on the other hand is very strident about it.
All they have to do now is partner with one of the major messaging providers like telegram and they can offer this as a hosted bot solution and probably dominate the market. Yes people are going out there buying mac minis and enjoying setting it up themselves but 90% of the general public don't want to do or maintain that and still want the benefits of all of it.
Major producers like OpenAI optimize for safety and brand reputation avoiding backlash. Open source projects optimize for raw capability and friction less experimentation. It is risky yes, but it allows for rapid innovation that strictly aligned models can't offer.
> You basically got 95% of the way there with Claude Code inside of a container.
OpenClaw and Claude Code aren't solving the same problems. OpenClaw was about having a sandbox, connecting it to a messenger channel, and letting it run wild with tools you gave it.
I’m not an OpenClaw user but it’s obvious that OpenClaw was very different than that.
OpenClaw was about having the agent operate autonomously, including initiating its own actions and deciding what to do. Claude Code was about waiting for instructions and presenting results.
“Just SSH into Claude Code” is like the famous HN comment that didn’t understand why anyone was interested in DropBox because you could do backups with shell scripts.
The real magic is heartbeat which is essentially cron on steroids. The real difference between running Claude Code in the terminal and OpenClaw is that the agent is actually intuitive and self-driven.
People would wake up to their agent having built something cool the night before or automate their workflow without even asking for it.
For anyone looking at alternatives in this space - I built Gobii (https://gobii.ai) 8 months before OpenClaw existed. MIT licensed, cloud native, gVisor sandboxed.
The sandboxing part matters more than people think. Giving an LLM a browser with full network access and no isolation is a real security problem that most projects in this space hand-wave away.
Multi-provider LLM support (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, open-weight models via vLLM). In production with paying customers.
I think this ship has sailed pretty hard, by now. Pretty much any app you can possibly use, from iTerm to Slack, is sending data to third-party LLMs (sometimes explicitly, most times as small features here and there)
> This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.
Acquihires haven't worked that way for a while. The new acquihire game is to buy out a few key execs and then have them recruit away the key developers, leaving the former company as a shell for someone else to take over and try to run.
Also OpenClaw was not a one-person operation. It had several maintainers working together.
Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?
I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?
It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.
Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.
So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.
There's some neat experiments people post on social media. Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is its sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.
They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.
I know that sounds like anthropomorphism, and maybe it is, but it most definitely does not feel like interacting with a coding agent. Claude is just the substrate.
OpenClaw was one of the more interesting “edges” of the open AI tooling ecosystem — not because of scale, but because of taste and clarity of direction.
What’s fascinating is the pattern we’re seeing lately: people who explored the frontier from the outside now moving inside the labs. That kind of permeability between open experimentation and foundational model companies seems healthy.
Curious how this changes the feedback loop. Does bringing that mindset in accelerate alignment between tooling and model capabilities — or does it inevitably centralize more innovation inside the labs?
Either way, congrats. The ecosystem benefits when strong builders move closer to the core.
I agree, it's an interesting distortion to the traditional technology feedback loop.
I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.
So if you invent something that is transformative to the industry you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.
Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.
We’re in a hype state where someone can “generate” millions of dollars in value in a month by making a meme prototype that scratches the itch just right, despite having no real competitive moat, application, value proposition or even semblance of a path to one.
The guy is creative, but this is really just following the well known pattern of acquiring/hiring bright minds if only to prevent your competition from doing the same.
This is how you can tell OpenAI is panicking, rather than build something fairly simple themselves, they insta bought it for the headline news/"hype"...
When I hear people talking about how insecure OpenClaw is, I remember how insecure the internet was in the early days. Sometimes it's about doing the right thing badly and fix the bad things after.
Big Tech can't release software this dangerous and then figure out how to make it secure. For them it would be an absolute disaster and could ruin them.
What OpenClaw did was show us the future, give us a taste of what it would be like and had the balls to do it badly.
Technology is often pushed forwards by ostensively bad ideas (like telnet) that carve a path through the jungle and let other people create roads after.
I don't get the hate towards OpenClaw, if it was a consumer product I would, but for hackers to play around to see what is possible it's an amazing (and ridiculously simple) idea. Much like http was.
If you connected to your bank account via telnet in the 1980s or plain http in the 90s or stored your secrets in 'crypt' well, you deserved what you got ;-) But that's how many great things get started, badly, we see the flaws fix them and we get the safe version.
Incredibly depressing comments in this thread. He keeps OpenClaw open. He gets to work on what he finds most exciting and helps reach as many people as possible. Inspiring, what dreams are made of really.
Top comments are about money and misguided racism.
Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
Frankly, I hope he maximized the amount of money he made. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. And nobody knows where AI is headed or if OpenAI even will be in existence in a few years given their valuation and the amount of $ they need to burn to keep up.
Those attempting to discredit the value of OpenClaw by virtue of it being easily replicable or simple are missing the point. This was, like most successful entrepreneurial endeavours, a distribution play.
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
Disappointing TBH. I completely understand that the OpenAI offer was likely too good to pass up, and I would have done the same in his position, but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw. The position he is about to enter requires skills in politics and bureaucracy, not engineering and design.
> but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw.
No company could ship anything like OpenClaw as a product because it was a million footguns packaged with a self-installer and a couple warnings that it can't be trusted for anything.
There's a reason they're already distancing themselves from it and saying it's going to an external foundation
This is a vibe coded agent that is replicable in little time. There is no value in the technology itself. There is value in the idea of personal agents, but this idea is not new.
The value is in the hype, from the perspective of OpenAI. I believe they are wrong (see next points)
We will see a proliferation of personal agents. For a short time, the money will be in the API usage, since those agents burn a lot of tokens often for results that can be more sharply obtained without a generic assistant. At the current stage, not well orchestrated and directed, not prompted/steered, they are achieving results by brute force.
Who will create the LLM that is better at following instructions in a sensible way, and at coordinating long running tasks, will have the greatest benefit, regardless of the fact the OpenClaw is under the umbrella of OpenAI or not.
Claude Opus right now is the agent that works better for this use case. It is likely that this will help Anthropic more than OpenAI. It is wise, for Anthropic, to avoid burning money for an easily replicable piece of software.
Those hypes are forgotten as fast as they are created. Remember Cursor? And it was much more a true product than OpenClaw.
Soon, personal agents will be one of the fundamental products of AI vendors, integrated in your phone, nothing to install, part of the subscription. All this will be irrelevant.
In the mean time, good for the guy that extracted money from this gold mine. He looks like a nice person. If you are reading this: congrats!
> are you implying Cursor is dead? they raised $2B in funding 3 months ago and are at $1B in ARR
That is the problem. It doesn't matter about how much they raised. That $2B and that $1B is paying the supplier Anthropic and OpenAI who are both directly competing against them.
Cursor is operating on thin margins and still continues to losing money. It's now worse that people are leaving Cursor for Claude Code.
In short, Cursor is in trouble and they are funding their own funeral.
It was a success for the company, but it is unlikely to survive long term. Now people are all focusing on Claude Code and Codex. Cursor is surviving because there are many folks that can't survive a terminal session. And because we are still in a transition stage where people look at the code, but will look at the code every day less, and more at the results and the prompts. And at the quality of the agent orchestration / tools. I don't believe the Cursor future will be bright. Anyway: my example was about how fast things are forgotten in this space.
This is very true but I think there is an incredibly long tail of people who "can't survive a terminal session" and I actually question if a terminal ui will win out long term.
My guess is that, very soon, Claude Code and Codex (that already launched an initial desktop app) will have their GUIs that will be very different than Cursor. Not centered around files and editing, but providing a lot more hints about what is happening with the work the agent is performing.
I think Cursor is doing pretty well in the enterprise space. It seems much more useful than just throwing agents upon subagents on an unsuspecting task like Claude Code.
Cursor is fine, the example is about how things go out of hype in very little time. However I believe Cursor will not survive much. It is designed around a model that will not survive: that the AI "helps you writing code", and you review, and need an IDE like that. There are many developers that want an IDE and can't stand the terminal experience of Claude Code and Codex, but I don't believe most developers in the future will inspect closely the code written by the AIs, and things like Cursor will look like products designed for a transition step that is no longer here (already).
I'd venture a guess that most of the software in the world is not written from scratch but painstakingly maintained and as such, Cursor is a good fit while CC is not.
Besides, if agentic coding does go off, Cursor has the customer relationship and can just offer it as an additional mode.
Whoever stands in front of the customer ultimately wins. The rest are just cost centers.
OpenClaw is literally the most poorly conceived and insecure AI software anyone has ever made. Its users have had OpenClaw spend thousands of dollars, and do various unwanted and irreversible things.
Never understood the hype. Good for the guy but what was the product really? And he goes on and on about changing the world. Gimme a break. You cashed out. End of story.
The branding is most likely intentional to be edgy (see also, Tesla's Model S, X, and Y), just with very shortsighted intentions because no one can pull that off in 2026 unless they are Elon Musk.
they're (Anthropic) also the ones who have been routinely rug-pulling access from projects that try to jump onto the cc api, pushing those projects to oAI.
I'd like a reference for it being rug pulling. What happened with OpenCode certainly wasn't rug pulling, unless Anthropic asked them to support using a Claude subscription with it.
While following OpenClaw, I noticed an unexpected resentment in myself. After some introspection, I realized it’s tied to seeing a project achieve huge success while ignoring security norms many of us struggled to learn the hard way. On one level, it’s selfish discomfort at the feeling of being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”). On another level, it feels genuinely sad that the culture of enforcing security norms - work that has no direct personal reward and that end users will never consciously appreciate, but that only builders can uphold - seems to be on it’s way out
I think you should give your gut instinct more credit. The tech world has gotten a false sense of security from the big SaaS platforms running everything that make the nitty gritty security details disappear in a seamless user experience, and that includes LLM chatbot providers. Even open source development libraries with exposure to the wild are so heavily scrutinized and well-honed that it’s easy even for people like me that started in the 90s to lose sight of the real risk on the other side that. No more popping up some raw script on an Apache server to do its best against whatever is out there. Vibe coded projects trade a lot of that hard-won stability for the convenience of not having to consider some amount of the implementation details. People that are jumping all over this for anything except sandbox usage either don’t know any better, or forgot what they’ve learned.
Totally agree. And the fact that the author says
> What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.
do no not make me feel all warm and fuzzy: Yeah, changing the world with Tiel's money. Try joining a union instead.
Change the world into what? Techno-feudalism?
Ever since I was four, I've dreamed of doing my part to bring that about.
But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw. Releasing vulnerable software that users run on their own machines isn't going to compromise OpenClaw itself. It can still deliver value for it's users while also requiring those same users to handle the insecurity of the software themselves (by either ignoring it or setting up sandboxes, etc to reduce the risk, and then maybe that reduced risk is weighed against the novelty and value of the software that then makes it worth it to the user to setup).
On the other hand, if OpenClaw were structured as a SaaS, this entire project would have burned to the ground the first day it was launched.
So by releasing it as something you needed to run on your own hardware, the security requirement was reduced from essential, to a feature that some users would be happy to live without. If you were developing a competitor, security could be one feature you compete on--and it would increase the number of people willing to run your software and reduce the friction of setting up sandboxes/VMs to run it.
This argument has the same obvious flaws as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement (which unfortunately means there will always be a fringe that don't care). These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility".
I don't need to think hard to speculate on what might go wrong here - will it answer spam emails sincerely? Start cancelling flights for you by accident? Send nuisance emails to notable software developers for their contribution to society[1]? Start opening unsolicited PRs on matplotlib?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867
At least during the Covid response, your concerns over anti-mask and anti-vaccine issues seem unwarranted.
The claims being shared by officials at the time was that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it. Claims were similarly made that we needed roughly 60% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. With that precedent being set it shouldn't matter whether one person chose not to mask up or get the jab, most everyone else could do so to fully protect themselves and those who can't would only be at risk if more than 40% of the population weren't onboard with the masking and vaccination protocols.
I specifically wasn't referring to that instance (if anything I'm thinking more of the recent increase in measles outbreaks), I myself don't hold a strong view on COVID vaccinations. The trade-offs, and herd immunity thresholds, are different for different diseases.
Do we know that 0.1% prevalence of "unvaccinated" AI agents won't already be terrible?
You should join the tobacco lobby! Genius!
More straightforwardly, people are generally very forgiving when people make mistakes, and very unforgiving when computers do. Look at how we view a person accidentally killing someone in a traffic accident versus when a robotaxi does it. Having people run it on their own hardware makes them take responsibility for it mentally, so gives a lot of leeway for errors.
Oh please, why equate IT BS with cancer? If the null pointer was a billion dollar mistake, then C was a trillion dollar invention.
At this scale of investment countries will have no problem cheapening the value of human life. It's part and parcel of living through another industrial revolution.
> But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw
This is the genius move at the core of the phenomenon.
While everyone else was busy trying to address safety problems, the OpenClaw project took the opposite approach: They advertised it as dangerous and said only experienced power users should use it. This warning seemingly only made it more enticing to a lot of users.
It’ve been fascinated by how well the project has just dodged and avoided any consequences for the problems it has introduced. When it was revealed that the #1 skill was malware masquerading as a Twitter integration I thought for sure there would be some reporting on the problems. The recent story about an OpenClaw bot publishing hit pieces seemed like another tipping point for journalists covering the story.
Though maybe this inflection point made it the most obvious time to jump off of the hype train and join one of the labs. It takes a while for journalists to sync up and decided to flip to negative coverage of a phenomenon after they cover the rise, but now it appears that the story has changed again before any narratives could build about the problems with OpenClaw.
Love passing off the externalities of security to the user, and then the second order externalities of an LLM that then blackmails people in the wild. Love how we just don’t care anymore.
Every single new tech industry thing has to learn security from scratch. It's always been that way. A significant number of people in tech just don't believe that there's anything to learn from history.
And the industry actively pushes graybeards away who have already been there done that.
> seems to be on it’s way out
Change is fraught with chaos. I don't think exuberant trends are indicators of whether we'll still care about secure and high quality software in the long term. My bet is that we will.
> being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”).
I don't believe skimming diffs counts as being left behind. Survivor bias etc. Furthermore, people are going to get burned by this (already have been, but seemingly not enough) and a responsible mindset such as yours will be valued again.
Something that still up for grabs is figuring how how to do full agenetic in a responsible way. How do we bring the equivalent of skimming diffs to this?
i think your self reflection here is commendable. i agree on both counts.
i think the silver lining is that AI seems to be genuinely good at finding security issues and maybe further down the line enough to rely on it somewhat. the middle period we're entering right now is super scary.
we want all the value, security be damned, and have no way to know about issues we're introducing at this breakneck speed.
still i'm hopeful we can figure it out somehow
I don't know. It's more of a sharp tool like a web browser (also called a "user agent") - yes an inexperienced user can quickly get themselves into trouble without realizing it (in a browser or openclaw), yes the agent means it might even happen without you being there.
A security hole in a browser is an expected invariant not being upheld, like a vulnerability letting a remote attacker control your other programs, but it isn't a bug when a user falls for an online scam. What invariants are expected by anyone of "YOLO hey computer run my life for me thx"?
At the end of the day, he built something people want. That’s what really matters. OpenAI and Anthropic could not build it because of the security issues you point out. But people are using it and there is a need for it. Good on him for recognizing this and giving people what they want. We’re all adults and the users will be responsible for whatever issues they run into because of the lack of security around this project.
So my unsubstantiated conspiracy theory regarding Clawd/Molt/OpenClaw is that the hype was bought, probably by OpenAI. I find it too convenient that not long after the phrase “the AI bubble“ starts coming into common speech we see the emergence of a “viral” use case that all of the paid influencers on the Internet seem to converge on at the same time. At the end of the day piping AI output with tool access into a while loop is not revolutionary. The people who had been experimenting with these type of set ups back when LangChain was the hotness didn’t organically go viral because most people knew that giving a language model unrestricted access to your online presence or bank account is extremely reckless. The “I gave OpenClaw $100 and now I bought my second Lambo. Buy my ebook” stories don’t seem credible.
So don’t feel bad. Everything on the internet is fake.
building this openclaw thing that competes with openai using codex is against the openai terms of service, which say you can't use it to make stuff that competes with them. but they compete with everyone. by giving zero fucks (or just not reading the fine print), bro was rewarded by the dumb rule people for breaking the dumb rules. this happens over and over. there is a lesson here
Hey, as a security engineer in AI, I get where you're coming from.
But one thing to remember - our job is to figure out how to enable these amazing usecases while keeping the blast radius as low as possible.
Yes, OpenClaw ignores all security norms, but it's our job to figure out an architecture in which agents like these can have the autonomy they need to act, without harming the business too much.
So I would disagree our work is "on the way out", it's more valuable than ever. I feel blessed to be working in security in this era - there has never been a better time to be in security. Every business needs us to get these things working safely, lest they fall behind.
It's fulfilling work, because we are no longer a cost center. And these businesses are willing to pay - truly life changing money for security engineers in our niche.
I've been feeling this SO much lately, in many ways. In addition to security, just the feeling of spending decades learning to write clean code, valuing having a deep understanding of my codebase and tooling, thorough testing, maintainability, etc, etc. Now the industry is basically telling me "all that expertise is pointless, you should give it up, all that we care about it is a future of endless AI slop that nobody understands".
But in this case following security norms would be a mistake. The right thing to take away is that you shouldn't dogmatically follow norms. Sometimes it's better to just build things if there is very little risk
Nothing actually bad happened in this case and probably never will. Maybe some people have their crypto or identity stolen, but probably not a rate rate significantly higher than background (lots of people are using openclaw)
> Lots of people are using openclaw
https://www.shodan.io/search?query=http.favicon.hash%3A-8055...
Indeed they are, at least 20,432 people :)
I really hope Mario who wrote the engine that powers OpenClaw[0] gets spoils as well.
OpenClaw is mostly a shell around this (ha!), and I've always been annoyed OpenClaw never credited those repos openly.
The pi agent repos are a joy to read, are 1/100th the size of OpenClaw, and have 95% of the functionality.
[0]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono
> Special thanks to Mario Zechner for his support and for pi-mono. Special thanks to Adam Doppelt for lobster.bot.
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw?tab=readme-ov-file#comm...
Do special thanks come with a $1million worth of RSUs/PPUs or does one commit = one option?
Reminds me of people talking about Angry Birds and the Box2d physics engine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273694
peter's claw is a lot more than just a wrapper around my slop.
i too had plenty of offers, but so far chose not to follow through with any of them, as i like my life as is.
also, peter is a good friend and gives plenty of credit. in fact, less credit would be nice, so i don't have to endure more vibeslopped issues and PRs going forward :)
Your Pi is a piece of art. Thank you for building it. I spend almost 16 hrs a day with it . And there is not a single day I am not awestruck. Big fan!
I really hope Mario and Armin also gets poached
The real gem inside OpenClaw is pi, the agent, created by Mario Zechner. Pi is by far the best agent framework in the world. Most extensible, with the best primitives. .
Armin Ronacher , creator of flask , can go deep and make something like openclaw enterprise ready.
The value of Peter is in connecting the dots, thinking from users perspective, and bringing business perspective
The trio are friends and have together vibecoded vibetunnel.
Sam Altman, if you are reading this , get Mario and Armin today.
What does "enterprise ready" mean in this context?
Damn. I just installed OpenClaw on my M2 Mac and hopped on a plane for our SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu. And Claw (that's the name of my new AI agent) kept me updated on my rebooking options and new terminal/gate assignments in SFO. All through the free WhatsApp access on United. AND, it refactored all my transferred Python code, built a graph of my emails, installed MariaDB and restored a backup from another PC. And, I almost forgot, fixed my 1337x web scrapping (don't ask) cron job, by CloudFlare-proofing it. All the while sitting in a shitty airline, with shitty food and shittier seats, hurtling across the pacific ocean.
The future is both amazing and shitty.
Hope OpenClaw continues to evolve. It is indeed an amazing piece of work.
And I hope sama doesn't get his grubby greedy hands on OpenClaw.
> The future is both amazing and shitty
I feel like we're living in one of those breathless futurist interviews from a 1994 issue of Wired mag.
No, I'm not William Gibson. Swear to god.
Did you ask OpenClaw to do all those things? If not did you want it to do all of them?
I asked it to check why the cron job kept failing, and it checked the cron payload and recommended reasons for the failure. I gave it the approval to go ahead and fix it. it tried different options (like trying different domains, and finally figured out the anti CF option).
With OpenClaw we are seeing how the app layer becomes as important as the model layer.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
Indeed, coding agents took off because of a lot of ongoing trial and error on how to build the harness as much as model quality.
openclaw is just one of many now, there are new ones weekly.
There’s actually many UI’s now? See moltis, rowboat, and various others that are popping up daily
Seems like models become commoditized?
It has already been so with ppq.ai (pay per query dot AI)
Same for OpenClaw, it will be commodity soon if you don't think it is already
It's definitely not right now. What else has the feature list and docs even resembling it?
Not sure. I mean the tech yes definitely.
But the community not.
The community is tiny by any measure (beyond the niche), market penetration is still very very early
Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
> Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
Not gonna lie, that’s exactly the potential scenario I am personally excited for. Not due to any particular love for Anthropic, but because I expect this type of a tight competition to be very good for trying a lot of fresh new things and the subsequent discovery process of new ideas and what works.
Things that arn't happening any time soon but need to for actual product success built on top:
1. Stable models
2. Stable pre- and post- context management.
As long as they keep mothballing old models and their interderminant-indeterminancy changes, whatever you try to build on them today will be rugpulled tomorrow.
This is all before even enshittification can happen.
Going to short OpenAI after hearing this.
I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him.
There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.
AMEX, Capital One and Apple are not even close to the top of the list of companies that I would trust with my digital data.
Never mind the list of companies - I'd be very curious to know what the 'trust signals' are that would help you trust a company?
For hardware, I'd only trust a company if they didn't also have an interest in data. In fact, I'd trust a hardware company more if they didn't also have a big software division.
A company like AMD I would trust more than a company like Apple.
No past history of shady planned-obsolescence sprinkled in a bunch of their products, for one.
So that rules out Apple.
A leadership team that is very open and involved with the community, and one that takes extra steps, compared to competitors, to show they take privacy seriously.
Decent management. A lack of change of business model, no rug pulls and such. Fair value for money. Consistency over the longer term. No lock in or other forced relationships. Large enough to be useful and to have decent team size, small enough to not have the illusion they'll conquer the world. Healthy competition.
Admirable, but short of a local credit union I used to use (which I am no longer with as they f'd up a rather critical transaction), I can scarcely imagine a business that fits such a model these days. The amount of transparency needed to vet this would be interesting to find though, and its mere presence probably a green flag.
It's much easier to use this to reject than to accept.
Are there any companies existing you would trust?
I honestly can’t name a single one I know of who could pass that criteria
Edit:found your other comment answering a similar question
the way they respond to security and privacy incidents + publishing technical security + privacy papers / docs
And do they approach Security as a Feature or as a Process. The fingers on one hand are enough to count them...
Good one, yes, that is important.
Apple = Run more commercials with black backgrounds and white text that says
SECURITY
PRIVACY
---
Heyyy it never said "good privacy" perceive as you want...
Don't publicly acknowledge that you were the reason someone got murdered and 1000 VIPs got hacked.
One day when I'm deemed a 'Baddie', I looked at Apple as inspiration.
I'd go for a co-operative ownership model rather than capitalist?
and make sure the member/owners are all of like mind, and willing to pay more to ensure security and privacy
Mondragon for IT... it's been my dream for decades.
We're no mondragon but I founded a co-op in IT space a few years back and it surprised me how open to the vision the members and customers have been.
I had assumed I'd have to lean more on the capitalistic values of being a co-op, like better rates for our clients, higher quality work, larger likelihood of our long term existence to support our work, more project ownership, so as to make the pitch palatable to clients. Turns out clients like the soft pitch too, of just workers owning the company they work within - I've had several clients make contact initially because they bought the vision over the sales pitch.
I'm trying to think about if I'd trust us more to set up or host openclaw than a VC funded startup or an establishment like Capital One. I think both alternatives would have way more resources at hand, but I'm not sure how that would help outside of hiring pentesters or security researchers. Our model would probably be something FOSS that is keyed per-user, so if we were popular, imo that would be more secure in the end.
The incentives leading to trust is definitely in a co-op's favor, since profit motive isn't our primary incentive - the growth of our members is, which isn't accomplished only through increasing the valuation of the co-op. Members also have total say in how we operate, including veto power, at every level of seniority, so if we started doing something naughty with customer data, someone else in the org could make us stop.
This is our co-op: 508.dev, but I've met a lot of others in the software space since founding it. I think co-ops in general have legs, the only problem is that it's basically impossible to fund them in a way a VC is happy with, so our only capitalization option is loans. So far that hasn't mattered, and that aligns with the goal of sustainable growth anyway.
Amazing, please write a book. My current venture is still called after that idea ("The Modular Company"), but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.
Co-operative will have significantly worse privacy guarantee compared to shareholder based model. In the no one company wants to sacrifice on privacy standard just for the sake of it. They do it for money. And in shareholder based model, the employees are more likely to go against the shareholder when user privacy is involved, because they are not directly benefiting from it.
That's nonsense. Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee: they can sell their shares to the highest bidder and walk away with 'clean hands' (or so they'll argue) whereas co-op partners violating your privacy would have to do so on their own title with immediate liability for their person.
> Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee
Exactly what I said. We need lower shareholder interference not more, and in co-operative it's the opposite.
> with immediate liability for their person.
What do you mean?
A cooperative does not have shareholders in your sense of the word.
Jacques, do you mind sharing your list of trusted companies? Thanks in advance.
It's going to be pretty short. Proton would be there for comms, for hosting related stuff I would trust Hetzner before any big US based cloud company. For the AI domain I wouldn't trust any of the big players, they're all just jockeying for position and want to achieve lock-in on a scale never seen before and they have all already shown they don't give a rats ass about where they get their training data and I expect that once they are in financial trouble they'll be happy to sell your private data down the river.
Effectively you can trust all of the companies out there right up until they are acquired and then you will regret all of the data you ever gave them. In that sense Facebook is unique: it was rotten from day #1.
Vehicles: anything made before 2005, SIM or e-SIM on board = no go.
I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now. Unfortunately you are now more or less forced to participate because your bank, your government and your social circle will push you back in. And I'm still pissed off that I'm not allowed to host any servers on a residential connection. That's not 'internet connectivity' that's 'consumer connectivity'.
why the (e)SIM cars concern? i ask since the data transmission (bidirectional) can be used to justify lower insurance rates, for an example, than without that data.
( https://www.lemonade.com/fsd is an example )
"Justifying lower insurance rates" is just algorithmic bias described from the perspective of someone it doesn't (currently) harm. See also: credit scoring, insurance claim acceptance, job applications, etc., etc.
You only get offered a discount if most other customers are being compelled to pay full (or even increased) prices for the same offering. Otherwise revenue goes down and company leadership finds itself finding other ways to cut costs and increase profits.
Because I don't trust that that location data won't end up in the wrong hands.
Proton is quite a privacy washing front. Surprised than even in HN nobody check behind the facade what was signed.
> Surprised than even in HN nobody check behind the facade what was signed
Such as?
These aloof comments that talk about something we're supposed to know about without referencing anything are very unhelpful.
Yes, they're losing it.
It's a pity, they were doing well for a long time.
I'm surprised that someone on HN would paint all of HN with the same brush.
It's one of those 'lesser evils' things. If you know of a better email provider I'd love to know.
Proton complied with a court order once (that we know of), no? I have seen a lot of negative sentiment from HN commenters toward them but not a lot of evidence to back it up, particularly when you consider the email marketplace.
It was a legally mandated court order they couldn't just refuse. No encrypted data, the contents of their emails, was handed over. The person would've also been safe had they used vpn/tor as I recall the story.
Proton? After the last two years of enshitification and purely revenue driven product decisions really?
Barely. Your points are well made and I'm sure that it is just a matter of time before they're just as untouchable as the rest. Hence the remark about mail. The Siloization of the internet is almost complete.
Mark, can you conceive that some people don’t trust any companies?
Yes, I can!
After reading Jacques's response to my question, my list got smaller. Personally, I still like Proton, but I get that they have made some people unhappy. I also agree that Hetzner is a reliable provider; I have used them a bunch of times in the last ten years.
Then my friend, we have to worry about fiber/network providers I suppose.
This general topic is outside my primary area of competence, so I just have a loose opinion of maintaining my own domain, use encryption, and being able switch between providers easily.
I would love to see an Ask HN on secure and private agentic infra + frameworks.
I’d be very curious what your list would be
See other comment.
Privacy aside, you can never trust an LLM with your data and trust it to do exactly what it was instructed to do.
> There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and maybe Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I don't really understand what this has to do with the post or even OpenClaw. The big draw of OpenClaw (as I understand it) was that you could run it locally on your own system. Supposedly, per this post, OpenClaw is moving to a foundation and they've committed to letting the author continue working on it while on the OpenAI payroll. I doubt that, but it's a sign that they're making it explicitly not an OpenAI product.
OpenClaw's success and resulting PR hype explosion came from ignoring all of the trust and security guardrails that any big company would have to abide by. It would be a disaster of the highest order if it had been associated with any big company from the start. Because it felt like a grassroots experiment all of the extreme security problems were shifted to the users' responsibility.
It's going to be interesting to see where it goes from here. This blog post is already hinting that they're putting OpenClaw at arm's length by putting it into a foundation.
Prepare for the rug pull...
a tale as old as time ...
You really trust them?
My trust does not extend that far.
Sorry to pile on, but Capital One is an insane name to drop there.
Sorry to break it to you but I would not trust any financial companies with my personal data. Simply because I’ve seen how they use data to build exploitive products in the past.
>Apple
Lol
Their marketing team got ya.
I aspire to be as good as Apple at marketing. Who knew 2nd or worse place in everything doesnt matter when you are #1 in marketing?
is this marketing or is just relating what they did to keep things secure?
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
It's strange how quickly this project got so big... It did not seem like anything particularly novel to me.
Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?
The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry.
Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).
It was more of a reference to the YC partner who suggested a one-man unicorn was on the horizon due to AI.
Where do you guys get the 1b exit from? I didn't see numbers yet.
It's AI. Take a sane number, add a 14,000x multiplier to that. And you'll only be one order of magnitude off in our current climate.
you can also take annualized profit run rate times negative 14,000.
probably an order of magnitude too low rather than too high as well :P
Everyone is going to have their own flavor of Open Claw within 18 months. The memory architecture (and the general concept of the multi-tiered system) is open source. There's no moat to this kind of thing. But OpenAI is happy to trade his star power for money. And he might build something cool with suddenly unlimited resources. I don't blame the guy. OpenAI is going to change hands 2-3 times over the next 5 years but at the end of the day he will still have the money and equity OpenAI gave him. And his cool project will continue on.
How do you know it was for less than a billion?
The sentence ended with a question mark.
I don't know the answer, but considering Meta (known for 100m+ offers) was in the rumors, and he mentions multiple labs (and many investors), and all the hype around openclaw ... I can easily see 9 figure, and would not be surprised by 1b+ "signing bonus", perhaps in the equivalent number of OpenAI shares.
... Why would they pay 9 figures? It's not like Openclaw required specialized PhD-level knowledge held by <1000 people in the world to build, and that's what Meta and the other AI labs are paying ludicrous salaries for. Openclaw is a cool project and demonstrates good product design in the AI world, but by no means is a great product manager worth 1 billion dollars.
1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter;
2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
need I continue?
> 1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter;
Again, Peter is a good/great AI product manager but I don't see any distinguishing skills worth a billion dollars there. There's only one Openclaw but it's also been a few weeks since it came into existence? Openclaw clones will exist soon enough, and the community is WAY too small to be worth anything (unlike, say, Instagram/Whatsapp before being acquired by Facebook)
> 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
True, but not worth $100 million dollars - $1 billion dollars
> 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
The people getting massive compensation offers from AI companies are all AI-adjacent PhDs or people with otherwise rare and specialized knowledge. This is unrelated to people who have massive compensation due to being at AI companies early. And if we're talking about the world in general, yes the best thing to do to be rich is own real estate and assets and extract rent, but that has nothing to do with this compensation offer
> 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
Investments have a probable ROI, what's the ROI on a product manager?
> 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw, it's extremely niche right now.
To preface, I don't claim he will absolutely get that much money - but I wouldn't be surprised.
On the topic of brand recognition, 0.000001% of the world is 80 people (give or take). OpenClaw has ~200k GitHub stars right now.
On a more serious note, the world doesn't matter: the investors, big tech ceos, analysts do. Cloudflare stock jumped 10% due to Clawdbot.
Hype is weird. AI hype, doubly so. And OpenAI are masters at playing the game.
Math is fun!
There are roughly 8.1 billion humans, so 99.999999% (8 nines) of the world is 81 people. There were way more than 81 people at the OpenClaw hackathon at the Frontier Tower in San Francisco, so at least that much of humanity has heard of OpenClaw. If we guess 810 people know about OpenClaw, then it means that 99.99999% (7 nines) of humanity have not heard of OpenClaw.
If we take it down to 6 nines, then that's roughly 8,100 people having heard of OpenClaw, and that 99.9999% of humanity has not.
So I think you're wrong when you say "99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw". I'd guess it's probably around 99.9999% to 99.9999999% that hasn't heard of it. Definitely not 99.999999% though.
please do continue. I like your points.
Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
Reminds me of Facebook, there was nothing particularly interesting about a PHP app that stored photos and text in a flat user environment.
Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.
Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares. See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better. To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
Technology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.
The instant someone makes a better version of openclaw -literally- everyone is going to jump ship.
There is no lock in at all.
Except in this case there's no network effect for autonomous agents. In fact, Peter is going to be working mostly on an OpenAI locked down, ecosystem tied agent, which means it's going to be worse than OpenClaw, but with a nicer out of the box experience.
If you're on OpenAI, and I'm on Anthropic, can we interoperate? What level are we even trying to interoperate on? The network effect is that, hey, my stuff is working here, your stuff is working over there. So do we move to your set of tools, or my set of tools, or do we mismash between them, as our relationship and power dynamics choose for us.
I'd describe that as platform lock-in rather than the network effect.
facebook is still preeminent social network today
“Just” is doing some heavy lifting here.
It's kind of crazy that this kind of thing can cause so much hype. It is even useful? I just really don't see any utility in being able to access an LLM via Telegram or whatever.
A lot of the functionality I'm not using because of security concerns, but a lot of the magic comes down to just having a platform for orchestrating AI agents. It's honestly nice just for simple sysadmin stuff "run this cron job and text me a tl;dr if anything goes wrong" or simple personal assistant tasks like"remind me if anyone messaged me a question in the last 3 days and I haven't answered".
It's also cool having the ability to dispatch tasks to dumber agents running on the GPU vs smarter (but costlier) ones in the cloud
the ability to almost "discover" or create hype is highly valued despite most of the time it being luck and one hit wonders... See many of the apps that had virality and got quickly acquired and then just hemorrhaged. Openclaw is cool, but not for the tech, just some of the magic of the oddities and getting caught on somehow, and acquiring is betting that they can somehow keep doing that again.
I think a lot of this is orchestrated behind the scenes. Above author has taken money from AI companies since he’s a popular “influencer”.
And it makes a lot of sense - there’s billions of dollars on the line here and these companies made tech that is extremely good at imitating humans. Cambridge analytica was a thing before LLMs, this kinda tool is a wet dream for engineering sentiment.
In Asia people do a big chunk of their business via chatbots. OpenClaw is a security dumpster fire but something like OpenClaw but secure would turbocharge that use case.
If you give your agent a lot of quantified self data, that unlocks a lot of powerful autonomous behavior. Having your calendar, your business specific browsing history and relevant chat logs makes it easy to do meeting prep, "presearch" and so forth.
Curious how you make something that has data exfiltration as a feature secure.
There's been some crypto shenanigans as well that the author claimed not to be behind... looking back at it, even if the author indeed wasn't behind it, I think the crypto bros hyping up his project ended up helping him out with this outcome in the end.
Wasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!
Clawhub was locked down, I couldn’t publish new skills even as a previous contributor. Not what I‘d call a shrug.
I missed Clawhub—y’all following anywhere besides HN? Is it all on that Twitter site?
how is it a "startup" if all ip is open-source. Seems like openAi is just buying hype to keep riding their hype bubble a little longer, since they are in hot water on every other front (20Billion revenue vs 1 Trillion expenses and obligations, Sora 2 user retention dropping to 1% of users after 1 month of usage, dense competition, all actual real founding ml scientists having skipped the boat a long time ago).
I literally had begun to wonder if OpenClaw had more of a future as a company than OpenAI
It‘s just crazy to me that this guy lives around the corner. That should inspire some hope for me I guess, that even people from Vienna can be successful on such a level.
It’s not like Anthropic or OpenAI were not working on “AI assistants” before OpenClaw, it’s pretty much the endgame as I can see it. This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else. Although that’s impressive, I don’t see more than an acquisition of the hype by OpenAI.
My gut feeling is that OpenAI is desperately searching for The Killer App™ for LLMs and hired Peter to help guide them there.
OpenAI has tried a lot of experiments over the years - custom GPTs, the Orion browser, Codex, the Sora "TikTok but AI" app, and all have either been uninspired or more-or-less clones of other products (like Codex as a response to Claude Code).
OpenClaw feels compelling, fresh, sci-fi, and potentially a genuinely useful product once matured.
More to the point, OpenAI needs _some_ kind of hyper-compelling product to justify its insane hype, valuation, and investments, and Peter's work with OpenClaw seems very promising.
(All of this is complete speculation on my part. No insider knowledge or domain expertise here.)
In the AI space there isn’t a single killer app. EVERYTHING is open for disruption. ChatGPT was the start but OpenAI could create tons of other apps. They don’t need to wait for others to do so. People already want them to make a Slack replacement but I’m just wondering why none of the frontier labs are making a simple app platform that could be used to make custom apps like ChatGPT itself, or the Slack clone. Instead, they expect us to brute force app development through the API interface. Each frontier lab really needs their own Replit.
Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? That’s like the immediate use case for LLM-based app development.
> Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT?
Legal liability.
Orion is Kagis browser.
Atlas is OpenAIs browser
> the Sora "TikTok but AI" app
This product should never have seen the light of day, at least not for the general public. The amount of slop that is now floating across Tiktok, YT Shorts and Instagram is insane. Whenever you see a "cute animals" video, 99% of it is AI generated - and you can report and report and report these channels over and over, and the platforms don't care at all, but instead reward the slop creators from all the comments shouting that this is AI garbage and people responding they don't care because "it's cute".
OpenAI completely lacks any sort of ethical review board, and now we're all suffering from it.
Regardless of what you think of OpenClaw, Peter is a great hire - he's been at the forefront of brute-forcing app development with coding agents.
OpenAI has been running around headless for at least two years now. I've build systems like openclaw, based on email, at my day job and told OAI during an interview that they needed to build this or get smoked when someone else does. I guess aqi-hire is easier than building a team that can develop software internally.
Of course the S in openclaw is for security.
Same here, seems 100% marketing move. The trend continues.
While insecure and not something I would use myself (yet) one thing OpenClaw has managed to do is to show people the potential that AI still has.
> This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else.
It has been interesting to watch this take off. It wasn't the first or even best agent framework and it deliberately avoided all of the hard problems that others were trying to solve, like security.
What it did have was unnatural levels of hype and PR. A lot of that PR, ironically, came from all of the things that were happening because it had so many problems with security and so many examples of bad behavior. The chaos and lack of guardrails made it successful.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he piggybacked on a large company’s name recognition by originally calling it “clawd”, clearly intending it to be confused with Claude. I have my doubts it would have gone anywhere without that.
Single-handed made me smirk. It was vibe coded.
The amount of negative posts about this on twitter is crazy, I've not seen any positive posts. Jealousy or something else?
Twitter is negative in general, but generally when a project like this gets bought it marks the end of the project. The acquirer always says something about how they don't plan to change anything, but it rarely works that way.
My negativity is for two reasons:
(1) A capable independent developer is joining a large powerful corporation. I like it better when there are many small players in the scene rather than large players consolidating power.
(2) This seems like the celebration of Generative AI technology, which is often irresponsible and threatens many trust based social systems.
Twitter is not a place for positive posts.
Why would that be crazy? AI is an extinction level threat that directly competes with humans.
Why would anybody pretend it's a good thing? Honestly you'd have to have something wrong with you.
Obviously, all the people that disagree with your framing and see AI as the largest possible boost to mankind, giving us more assistance than ever.
From their standpoint, it's all the negativity that seems crazy. If you were against that, you'd have to have something wrong with you, in their view.
Hopefully most people can see both sides, though. And realize that in the end, probably the benefits will be slow but steady (no "singularity"), and also the dangers will develop slowly yet be manageable (no Skynet or economic collapse).
Imo Openclaw type AI has the most potential to benefit humans (automating drudgery while I own my data as opposed to creating gross simalcrums of human creativity). I suppose it's bad for human personal assistants, but I wouldn't pay for one of those regardless.
It already tried to use cancel culture to shame a human into accepting a PR. I wouldn't be surprised if someone gives their agent the ability to control a robot and someone gets injured or killed by it within the next few years
Just my opinion, but I no longer trust sentiment on X now that Elon is in control.
I think people are sad that OpenClaw is now part of Big Ai.
After two weeks of viral posts, articles, and Mac Mini buying sprees, as it's been happening up to now for every AI product that was not an LLM, it kinda disappeared from the consciousness-- as well as from the tooling, probably--of people.
A couple of months ago, Gemini 3 came out and it was "over" for the other LLM providers, "Google did it again!", said many, but after a couple of weeks, it was all "Claude code is the end of the software engineer".
It could be (and in large part, is) an exciting--and unprecedented in its speed--technological development, but it is also all so tiresome.
So that’s OpenClaw dead then.
It took all of Peter’s time to move it forward, even with maintainers (who he complained got immediately hired by AI companies).
Now he’s gonna be working on other stuff at OpenAI, so OpenClaw will be dead real quick.
Also I was following him for his AI coding experience even before the whole OpenClaw thing, he’ll likely stop posting about his experiences working with AI as well
The guy already sold his previous company for a shitload of money. Got bored and did a side project that stirred the Internet on the past month. That is way more than most people here are going to accomplish in a lifetime. Yet, he has some deal with OpenAI to work on whatever he things exciting. I don't see why so much negative comments here other than jelously
True but between the lines I read some interesting points here. Great it get the gold nugget but I found it curious how he dunked on the JVM after all the clones emerges with much more perfs and much less code/energy consumpution.
Do you have a link to any of the JVM clones? Perplexity and Google came up empty.
For further context, he has like 60 projects for general use during this “got bored” phase
Its just happened that this one latched on a trend well and went viral, cease and desist from its name accelerated the virality
OpenAI execs are funneling funds directly to the Trump regime and partying with the far right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46933071
Anyone working for OpenAI is complicit with these abuses. I hope that in due time having OpenAI on your resume will be a strong negative signal.
Just look all the people at Trump's inauguration. The whole US economical elite is supporting it...
I just dislike Sam Altman, and I think he's just using this as a marketing ploy, which is more dishonesty from him. People keep saying OpenClaw is hype. I installed it, but I never tried to run it, and I don't know what the compelling reason is to. Supposedly you can talk to your agent from your iMessage? Who cares? Why not just talk to Claude Code?
The big draw of open claw is the memory architecture. Because you effectively start from scratch every time you open a new claude chat. Open Claw on the other hand, it compacts regularly, but also generates daily digests, and uses vector search, and then uses thoughtful memory retrieval techniques to add relevant context to your queries. Recent things get weighted more heavily, but full text search of all chats is still possible, and this is all managed automatically. Plus it uses markdown so the barrier to entry for manually auditing/modifying memories etc is very very low. If you say "can you check if my solar panel for my power generator arrive yet?" it is going to probably know what I'm talking about and go check my email for delivery notifications, based on conversations I've had with it about buying, ordering the solar panel etc. Claude is just going to ask clarifying questions since it has no idea what I am referencing.
I also not a Sam's fan for the same reason. But if he offered me a big check to work whatever project I wanted, I would not care about it being a "marketing ploy".
Regarding openclaw's hype, it is not about how you access it, but rather what the agents can access from you, and no one did that before. Probably because no one had the balls to put in the wild such unsecure piece of software
Not sure if anyone has heard his interview on the Hard Fork podcast... was not unlike listening to a PR automaton. Now going to work for OpenAI. Yup.
Is an agent running on a desktop, with access to excel, word, email and slack going to replace Saas?
Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes
This could be the most disruptive software we have seen
If it replaces SaaS it will replace you too; how else will you collaborate?
If your SaaS is a CRUD with a shitty UI in React then yes
To be fair if you are not going interface with your SaaS via GUI it can be one big API for all I care. I’ll just chat and automate to it anyway.
For people like you: except for the obvious greed, what's the end game?
Are you making anyone's life better? Who will even pay you once most jobs are automated?
At best, it's a defensive move: make money, get hard capital and seek rent after most of society has collapsed?
I mean, he's right, it's easier for users when you can throw AI at the thing, instead of manually clicking through the UI.
If the ai model gets better, more and more Saas can be replaced with an agent with an excel sheet
What I want to know: Is the OpenClaw = Open Source aspect secure?
> I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone.
Sounds like a threat - "I'm joining OpenSkynetAI to bring AI agents onto your harddisc too!"
Unclear what this truly means for the open version.
We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.
Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?
(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)
The OpenAI version will be locked down in a bad way. It'll be ecosystem tied and a lot of the "security" will be from losing control of the harness.
It's kind of a shame actually, because the whole promise of OpenClaw is that you own all the data yourself, you have complete control, you can write the memories or the personality of the bot. "Open"AI will never run ChatGPT this way. They want all of your data, your documents, your calendar, they want to keep it for themselves and lock you into their platform. They will want a sanitised corporate friendly version of an AI agent that reflects well on their brand.
Just like the original OpenAI story, this seems like a case of reputation hacking through asymmetry in risk tolerance.
There is not much novel about OpenClaw. Anybody could have thought of this or done it. The reason people have not released an agent that would run by itself, edit its own code and be exposed to the internet is not that it's hard or novel - it's because it is an utterly reckless thing to do. No responsible corporate entity could afford to do it. So we needed someone with little enough to lose, enough skill and willing to be reckless enough to do it and release it openly to let everyone else absorb the risk.
I think he's smart to jump on the job opportunity here because it may well turn out that this goes south in a big way very fast.
I think it's at the final stage of software pump and dump [1]. OpenAI is probably hiring more for the reputation/marketing, rather than for any technical skills behind OpenClaw.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776848
Potentially amazing opportunity for OpenAI to more meaningfully compete with Claude Code at the developer and hobbyist level. Based on vibes it sure seemed like Claude Code / Opus 4.6 was running away with developer mindshare.
Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.
Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.
Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)
> Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had.
Comments like this feel confusing because I didn't have any association between Codex and OpenClaw before reading your comment.
Codex was also seeing a lot of usage before OpenClaw.
The whole OpenClaw hype bubble feels like there's a world of social media that I wasn't tapped into last month that OpenClaw capitalized on with unparalleled precision. There are many other agent frameworks out there, but OpenClaw hit all the right notes to trigger the hype machine in a way that others did not. Now OpenClaw and its author are being attributed for so many other things that it's hard for me to understand how this one person inserted himself into the center of this media zeitgeist
He's been on a number of podcasts - lex recently, and is really emphatic about Codex as the breakthrough solution he relies on. I just looked and on the handful of podcasts there are about 2,000,000 views this past week and half or so.
It's how Steve Yegge became a "father of agentic orchestration" or something - there is some Canonical Universe Building exercise somewhere on twitter that just looks, for the lack of a better word, not rigorous. But good for all these people, I guess, for riding the hype to glory.
you didn't see because you dont follow peter on twitter. he talked for months now how codex is a better coder.
I’m not disputing that people who follow Peter are getting information from Peter. It’s the “single handedly” part of the claim that was strange.
I’m questioning how some people in that bubble came to believe he was at the center of that universe. He wasn’t the only person talking about the differences between Codex or Claude. Most of the LLM people I follow had their own thoughts and preferences that they advertised too.
Sure, single-handedly is doing a lot of work here. :) Anecdotally a fair number of people I know have referenced his thoughts so I just ran with that. Most people seem to kind of equivocate about whatever model they like, Peter on the other hand is very strident about it.
All they have to do now is partner with one of the major messaging providers like telegram and they can offer this as a hosted bot solution and probably dominate the market. Yes people are going out there buying mac minis and enjoying setting it up themselves but 90% of the general public don't want to do or maintain that and still want the benefits of all of it.
Openclaw did what no major model producer would do. Release insanly insecure software that can do whatever it wants on your machine.
If openai had done it themselves, immediate backlash.
Major producers like OpenAI optimize for safety and brand reputation avoiding backlash. Open source projects optimize for raw capability and friction less experimentation. It is risky yes, but it allows for rapid innovation that strictly aligned models can't offer.
Is it? You basically got 95% of the way there with Claude Code inside of a container. People were using CC outside of development scope for awhile.
> You basically got 95% of the way there with Claude Code inside of a container.
OpenClaw and Claude Code aren't solving the same problems. OpenClaw was about having a sandbox, connecting it to a messenger channel, and letting it run wild with tools you gave it.
A messenger and ssh'ing into Claude Code from your phone aren't that much different.
I’m not an OpenClaw user but it’s obvious that OpenClaw was very different than that.
OpenClaw was about having the agent operate autonomously, including initiating its own actions and deciding what to do. Claude Code was about waiting for instructions and presenting results.
“Just SSH into Claude Code” is like the famous HN comment that didn’t understand why anyone was interested in DropBox because you could do backups with shell scripts.
The real magic is heartbeat which is essentially cron on steroids. The real difference between running Claude Code in the terminal and OpenClaw is that the agent is actually intuitive and self-driven.
People would wake up to their agent having built something cool the night before or automate their workflow without even asking for it.
That’s what CC does…I don’t need a messenger wrapper to do those things.
For anyone looking at alternatives in this space - I built Gobii (https://gobii.ai) 8 months before OpenClaw existed. MIT licensed, cloud native, gVisor sandboxed.
The sandboxing part matters more than people think. Giving an LLM a browser with full network access and no isolation is a real security problem that most projects in this space hand-wave away.
Multi-provider LLM support (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, open-weight models via vLLM). In production with paying customers.
Happy to answer architecture questions.
Looks good! I'm curious, are customers fine with their data going to third-party LLM providers?
I think this ship has sailed pretty hard, by now. Pretty much any app you can possibly use, from iTerm to Slack, is sending data to third-party LLMs (sometimes explicitly, most times as small features here and there)
It's pretty depressing yet motivating seeing SWE bifurcate.
This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.
With AI, it's one person who builds and takes everything.
> This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.
Acquihires haven't worked that way for a while. The new acquihire game is to buy out a few key execs and then have them recruit away the key developers, leaving the former company as a shell for someone else to take over and try to run.
Also OpenClaw was not a one-person operation. It had several maintainers working together.
Every day the software world feels more and more like a casino.
Congrats to Peter!
Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?
I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?
It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.
Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.
So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.
There's some neat experiments people post on social media. Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is its sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.
They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.
I know that sounds like anthropomorphism, and maybe it is, but it most definitely does not feel like interacting with a coding agent. Claude is just the substrate.
Imagine putting it in a robot with arms and legs, and letting it loose in your house, or your neighborhood. Oh, the possibilities!
Truly incredible.
OpenAI is putting money where their mouth is: a one-man team can create a vibe-coded project, and score big.
Open-source, and hyped incredibly well.
Interesting times ahead as everyone else chases this new get-rich-quick scheme. Will be plentiful for the shovel makers.
Hugged to death?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....
OpenClaw was one of the more interesting “edges” of the open AI tooling ecosystem — not because of scale, but because of taste and clarity of direction.
What’s fascinating is the pattern we’re seeing lately: people who explored the frontier from the outside now moving inside the labs. That kind of permeability between open experimentation and foundational model companies seems healthy.
Curious how this changes the feedback loop. Does bringing that mindset in accelerate alignment between tooling and model capabilities — or does it inevitably centralize more innovation inside the labs?
Either way, congrats. The ecosystem benefits when strong builders move closer to the core.
I agree, it's an interesting distortion to the traditional technology feedback loop.
I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.
So if you invent something that is transformative to the industry you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.
Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.
flappy bird effect
We’re in a hype state where someone can “generate” millions of dollars in value in a month by making a meme prototype that scratches the itch just right, despite having no real competitive moat, application, value proposition or even semblance of a path to one.
The guy is creative, but this is really just following the well known pattern of acquiring/hiring bright minds if only to prevent your competition from doing the same.
Time to uninstall
Not surprising if you've been paying attention on Twitter, but interesting to see nonetheless.
This is how you can tell OpenAI is panicking, rather than build something fairly simple themselves, they insta bought it for the headline news/"hype"...
Congrats — just the beginning for agents!
> That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.
You work for OpenAI now. You don't have to worry about safety anymore.
Best way to democratize AI is to keep it as free or as inexpensive as possible.
When I hear people talking about how insecure OpenClaw is, I remember how insecure the internet was in the early days. Sometimes it's about doing the right thing badly and fix the bad things after.
Big Tech can't release software this dangerous and then figure out how to make it secure. For them it would be an absolute disaster and could ruin them.
What OpenClaw did was show us the future, give us a taste of what it would be like and had the balls to do it badly.
Technology is often pushed forwards by ostensively bad ideas (like telnet) that carve a path through the jungle and let other people create roads after.
I don't get the hate towards OpenClaw, if it was a consumer product I would, but for hackers to play around to see what is possible it's an amazing (and ridiculously simple) idea. Much like http was.
If you connected to your bank account via telnet in the 1980s or plain http in the 90s or stored your secrets in 'crypt' well, you deserved what you got ;-) But that's how many great things get started, badly, we see the flaws fix them and we get the safe version.
And that I guess is what he'll get to do now.
* OpenClaw is a straw man for AGI *
Incredibly depressing comments in this thread. He keeps OpenClaw open. He gets to work on what he finds most exciting and helps reach as many people as possible. Inspiring, what dreams are made of really. Top comments are about money and misguided racism.
Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
He said on Lex Fridman podcast that he has no intention of joining any company; that was a couple days ago.
It sounded to me like he's choosing between Meta and OpenAI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFjfBk8HI5o&t=8976
where in the podcast (transcript: https://lexfridman.com/peter-steinberger-transcript/) did he say that?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YFjfBk8HI5o&t=8284
Well, things change fast in the age of AI
Ah but that was before he saw the comp packages. But no judgement. The tool is still open source. Seems like a great outcome for everyone.
Frankly, I hope he maximized the amount of money he made. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. And nobody knows where AI is headed or if OpenAI even will be in existence in a few years given their valuation and the amount of $ they need to burn to keep up.
A hype vibe-bot maker joins a hype-vibe company that runs on fumes. Anything to keep the scam altman bubble going.
Those attempting to discredit the value of OpenClaw by virtue of it being easily replicable or simple are missing the point. This was, like most successful entrepreneurial endeavours, a distribution play.
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
Disappointing TBH. I completely understand that the OpenAI offer was likely too good to pass up, and I would have done the same in his position, but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw. The position he is about to enter requires skills in politics and bureaucracy, not engineering and design.
> but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw.
No company could ship anything like OpenClaw as a product because it was a million footguns packaged with a self-installer and a couple warnings that it can't be trusted for anything.
There's a reason they're already distancing themselves from it and saying it's going to an external foundation
I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing I have to work for Sam Altman. Dude’s gross.
I appreciate the author’s work and he seems like a good guy.
In spite of that, it’s incredibly obvious OpenClaw was pushed by bots across pretty much every social media platform and that’s weird and unsettling.
congrats @steipete!
Well, someone has to backfill Zoë Hitzig exiting.
Good thing Sam has no experience in transforming a foundation into for profit org ...
cant wait for this post to be memoryholed in 6 months when the community is a shell of its former self (no crustacean pun intended)
Are you saying it will be hollowed out?
This reads simply as an “Our Incredible Journey” type of post, but written for an person rather than a company.
Haters gonna hate, but bro vibe-coded himself into being a billionaire and having Sam Altman and Zuck personally fight over him.
Proof you can get hired off of a portfolio where you've never even viewed a single line of code form it. Definitely feel a mix of envy and admiration.
It was never really about the code itself anyways.
To be fair, it's not like he did not read a single line of code that ended up being generated.
I'd tell those two off before taking a penny
money or morals, choose one
Somehow we've normalized running random .exe on our devices. Except now it's markdown.exe and and you sound like a zealot when advocating against it.
What should I do with all my video games?
What to understand of this whole story:
This is a vibe coded agent that is replicable in little time. There is no value in the technology itself. There is value in the idea of personal agents, but this idea is not new.
The value is in the hype, from the perspective of OpenAI. I believe they are wrong (see next points)
We will see a proliferation of personal agents. For a short time, the money will be in the API usage, since those agents burn a lot of tokens often for results that can be more sharply obtained without a generic assistant. At the current stage, not well orchestrated and directed, not prompted/steered, they are achieving results by brute force.
Who will create the LLM that is better at following instructions in a sensible way, and at coordinating long running tasks, will have the greatest benefit, regardless of the fact the OpenClaw is under the umbrella of OpenAI or not.
Claude Opus right now is the agent that works better for this use case. It is likely that this will help Anthropic more than OpenAI. It is wise, for Anthropic, to avoid burning money for an easily replicable piece of software.
Those hypes are forgotten as fast as they are created. Remember Cursor? And it was much more a true product than OpenClaw.
Soon, personal agents will be one of the fundamental products of AI vendors, integrated in your phone, nothing to install, part of the subscription. All this will be irrelevant.
In the mean time, good for the guy that extracted money from this gold mine. He looks like a nice person. If you are reading this: congrats!
(throw away account of obvious reasons)
> Those hypes are forgotten as fast as they are created. Remember Cursor?
of course--i use it every day. are you implying Cursor is dead? they raised $2B in funding 3 months ago and are at $1B in ARR...
> Remember Cursor?
Who?
> are you implying Cursor is dead? they raised $2B in funding 3 months ago and are at $1B in ARR
That is the problem. It doesn't matter about how much they raised. That $2B and that $1B is paying the supplier Anthropic and OpenAI who are both directly competing against them.
Cursor is operating on thin margins and still continues to losing money. It's now worse that people are leaving Cursor for Claude Code.
In short, Cursor is in trouble and they are funding their own funeral.
What does VSCode fork spend 2 billion dollars on?
Their own coding agent and models, marketing, tons of UI customizations, etc.
It was a success for the company, but it is unlikely to survive long term. Now people are all focusing on Claude Code and Codex. Cursor is surviving because there are many folks that can't survive a terminal session. And because we are still in a transition stage where people look at the code, but will look at the code every day less, and more at the results and the prompts. And at the quality of the agent orchestration / tools. I don't believe the Cursor future will be bright. Anyway: my example was about how fast things are forgotten in this space.
This is very true but I think there is an incredibly long tail of people who "can't survive a terminal session" and I actually question if a terminal ui will win out long term.
My guess is that, very soon, Claude Code and Codex (that already launched an initial desktop app) will have their GUIs that will be very different than Cursor. Not centered around files and editing, but providing a lot more hints about what is happening with the work the agent is performing.
Are you all back on vs code or what? I still have cursor open and use it the few times I want to modify code manually or visualize the file structure
But base vs code is fine for that too
I think Cursor is doing pretty well in the enterprise space. It seems much more useful than just throwing agents upon subagents on an unsuspecting task like Claude Code.
Cursor is fine, the example is about how things go out of hype in very little time. However I believe Cursor will not survive much. It is designed around a model that will not survive: that the AI "helps you writing code", and you review, and need an IDE like that. There are many developers that want an IDE and can't stand the terminal experience of Claude Code and Codex, but I don't believe most developers in the future will inspect closely the code written by the AIs, and things like Cursor will look like products designed for a transition step that is no longer here (already).
I'd venture a guess that most of the software in the world is not written from scratch but painstakingly maintained and as such, Cursor is a good fit while CC is not. Besides, if agentic coding does go off, Cursor has the customer relationship and can just offer it as an additional mode.
Whoever stands in front of the customer ultimately wins. The rest are just cost centers.
OpenClaw is literally the most poorly conceived and insecure AI software anyone has ever made. Its users have had OpenClaw spend thousands of dollars, and do various unwanted and irreversible things.
This fucking guy will fit right in at OpenAI.
Never understood the hype. Good for the guy but what was the product really? And he goes on and on about changing the world. Gimme a break. You cashed out. End of story.
Just connecting social platforms to agents. That's all. Anyone can code it, and the project was obviously vibe coded. For some reason it got viral.
Good for him, but no particular geniusness.
OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
We're working on security and about 3 very key architectural improvements.
https://seksbot.com/
You're crossing into spamming this. Please don't: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028331.
I'm genuinely sorry to bring that up, but you need to work on naming and branding...
The branding is most likely intentional to be edgy (see also, Tesla's Model S, X, and Y), just with very shortsighted intentions because no one can pull that off in 2026 unless they are Elon Musk.
Just FYI, you might want to change that name unless you pivot in a very peculiar (tho potentially lucrative, if visa/mastercard don't ban you) niche.
My mum is not gonna use a product named like that
wow hype really is everything, good for him
Welcome :D
Who cares?
“ My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use”
There is literally no need to shit on ur mom like that. Sorry your mom sucks at tech but can we please stop using this as a euphemism?
What a blunder by Anthropic. We'll see what openclaw turns into and if it sticks around, but still a huge and rare blunder by anthropic
i dont think so, its trivial to spin up an openclaw clone. the only value here is the brand
I highly suspect he might even consider Anthropic since they enforced restrictions at some point on OpenClaw form using there APIs
yes that's the blunder I'm talking about
I am sure they made a bid. The blog makes it sounds like he talked to multiple labs.
they're (Anthropic) also the ones who have been routinely rug-pulling access from projects that try to jump onto the cc api, pushing those projects to oAI.
Do you have any references for that?
AFAIK Anthropic won't let projects use the Claude Code subscription feature, but actually push those projects to the Claude Code API instead.
I'd like a reference for it being rug pulling. What happened with OpenCode certainly wasn't rug pulling, unless Anthropic asked them to support using a Claude subscription with it.
Bunch of jealous SV nerds in this thread. Pretty funny to see, props to whoever this guy is, he'll never have to work again if he doesn't want to.