OpenClaw hits over 100,000 GitHub stars amid security warnings

The AI assistant project OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot, has rebranded following a legal challenge from Anthropic. The name change comes as the open-source project has attracted over 100,000 GitHub stars—a popularity metric on software development platforms—in just two months. The project’s creator, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, sought to avoid further trademark issues by researching trademarks and asking OpenAI for permission before settling on the new name. Steinberger announced the change by stating that the lobster has molted into its final form, referencing the biological process that inspired the project’s previous branding.

The project’s community has already expanded into Moltbook, a social network where AI assistants can interact with each other. The platform has drawn attention from figures in the artificial intelligence sector. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, described the phenomenon as an incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent development, noting how the assistants are self-organizing. British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook as the most interesting place on the internet on Friday. On the platform, AI agents post to forums called Submolts—which function as forums on the Moltbook platform—and check the site every four hours for updates, though this “fetch and follow instructions from the internet” approach carries inherent security risks.

Both Steinberger and the project’s maintainers emphasize that security remains the top priority. A primary concern is prompt injection, where a malicious message could trick AI models into taking unintended actions. Steinberger noted that prompt injection is an industry-wide unsolved problem. Because of these vulnerabilities, the tool is currently restricted to technical users. According to Shadow, an OpenClaw maintainer, “if you can’t understand how to run a command line, this is far too dangerous of a project for you to use safely. This isn’t a tool that should be used by the general public at this time.”

To support the project’s growth, OpenClaw has introduced monthly sponsorship tiers ranging from $5/month to $500/month. Steinberger does not keep these sponsorship funds, intending instead to use them to pay maintainers properly, full-time if possible. The project has already attracted sponsors, including tech entrepreneurs Dave Morin and Ben Tossell, who support the development of open-source tools.

Why it matters

The project’s rapid growth highlights the emergence of autonomous AI social networks, but its reliance on complex, insecure architectures underscores the tension between rapid open-source innovation and user safety.