Goodbye Moltbot: OpenClaw emerges as latest name for fast-growing personal AI assistant
The open source AI project formerly known as Clawdbot has adopted a new identity after a series of rapid rebrands and mounting community interest.
The viral personal AI assistant once called Clawdbot has re-emerged under a new name, settling on OpenClaw after a brief and aborted attempt to rebrand as Moltbot.
The earlier change followed a legal challenge from Anthropic, the maker of Claude, although the latest decision was taken independently and without external pressure.
Its creator, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, said the OpenClaw name was chosen only after formal trademark checks and direct confirmation from OpenAI that it raised no objections.
Federico Viticci
In a blog post, Steinberger said the project had now reached what he described as its final form, drawing again on the lobster imagery that has become part of its identity.
The rapid rebranding underlines how young the project remains, despite its explosive growth and the accumulation of more than 100,000 stars on GitHub in roughly two months.
Steinberger said the new name was intended to reflect the project’s open source roots and the scale of its contributor base, which has expanded beyond what one person could manage.
That community has already produced experimental offshoots, including Moltbook, a network where AI agents communicate with each other.
Andrej Karpathy, formerly head of AI at Tesla, described the phenomenon as a striking example of near science fiction becoming reality.
Experts said the platform’s design was compelling, but warned that its automated instruction-following model carried inherent security risks.
Steinberger, who previously built the document software company PSPDFkit, said OpenClaw was no longer a personal experiment but a collective effort with multiple maintainers.
