The wild rise of OpenClaw… — Transcript

Explore Open Claw, a powerful open source AI assistant that automates your life 24/7 using Claude and GPT-5, with easy setup and versatile skills.

Key Takeaways

  • Open Claw is a versatile, open source AI assistant that automates real-world tasks continuously.
  • It supports multiple AI backends and messenger integrations, making it highly customizable and accessible.
  • Self-hosting on affordable hardware reduces reliance on costly third-party AI services.
  • The project has gained rapid popularity, reflected in GitHub stars and hardware sales.
  • Open Claw empowers developers to create personalized automations and workflows with ease.

Summary

  • Open Claw (formerly Clawd Bot and Molt Bot) is a free, open source AI assistant for developers, active 24/7 without breaks.
  • It integrates AI models like Anthropic's Claude and GPT-5 to automate tasks such as calendar management, email cleanup, and stock monitoring.
  • Created by Peter Steinberger, Open Claw runs on lightweight hardware like Raspberry Pi or Mac Mini, enabling self-hosting.
  • Setup involves installing via a single command, connecting an AI provider API key, and linking messenger apps like Telegram for interaction.
  • Users can configure built-in or custom skills and utilize hooks for automations triggered by agent commands.
  • Open Claw offers a gateway dashboard for managing chats and configurations, enhancing user control and customization.
  • The bot supports real-time automations, such as stock tracking with notifications sent via Telegram.
  • The video also highlights Tracer, a sponsor tool that improves coding agents with an orchestration system and Epic mode for project planning.
  • Anthropic challenged the original name due to similarity with their Claude AI, prompting multiple renamings before settling on Open Claw.
  • Open Claw represents a cost-effective alternative to paid AI assistant subscriptions, emphasizing open source and self-hosting benefits.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
One of the most exciting AI apps for developers in 2026 is Claude.
00:03
Speaker A
No, not that Claude, but Clawd Bot, a free and open source project that's not just another lame chatbot.
00:09
Speaker A
But a tool that takes action in the real world 24 hours a day, seven days per week without smoke breaks.
00:15
Speaker A
And it does this while remembering everything and will hit you up on Telegram or WhatsApp as it automates your entire life.
00:21
Speaker A
Over the last few weeks, everybody's been going crazy over it.
00:24
Speaker A
It's racked up over 65,000 GitHub stars in record time and caused Mac Mini sales to go through the roof, selling out everywhere.
00:31
Speaker A
In today's video, we'll take a hands-on look at everything it can do.
00:35
Speaker A
But its popularity has already created some problems.
00:37
Speaker A
Earlier this week, Anthropic, a company that believes open source AI is too dangerous for the common man, woke up and chose violence.
00:43
Speaker A
Clawd Bot sounded too similar to their beloved Claude.
00:47
Speaker A
So they threatened to break the developer's knees with a lead pipe if they don't change the name.
00:50
Speaker A
So now Clawd Bot is officially called Molt Bot.
00:53
Speaker A
Actually, no, wait a minute, Molt Bot, that name sucks.
00:56
Speaker A
Today, they changed the name once again to its final form, Open Claw.
01:40
Speaker A
The same dangerous AI assistant with a new lobster identity.
01:43
Speaker A
It is January 30th, 2026, and you are watching the Code Report.
01:47
Speaker A
Open Claw was created by Peter Steinberger, the founder of the developer tools company PSPDFKit, aka Nutrient.
01:54
Speaker A
But just look at this dude's unhinged GitHub profile, it's less of a resume and more of a heat map of pure uninterrupted software obsession.
02:00
Speaker A
What's crazy is that this guy retired and then came back for an encore by giving us Molt Bot for free.
02:06
Speaker A
A tool written in TypeScript that wraps Claude and GPT-5 to stay alive 24/7.
02:12
Speaker A
It can manage your calendar, clean up your email, run scripts, find out how much money you're losing in the stock market, and deploy broken code with absolute confidence.
02:20
Speaker A
And best of all, it can do all of this from your own tiny self-hosted VPS, a Raspberry Pi, or even a Mac Mini if you really want to overdo it.
02:27
Speaker A
There's no reason to pay another random startup $29 per month for the privilege.
02:31
Speaker A
But to understand its full power, let's put it to work right now.
02:34
Speaker A
The first step is to install it, which can be done with a single command on any system.
02:39
Speaker A
Although Linux would be the preferred route.
03:20
Speaker A
Once installed, you'll have access to the Clawd Bot or Molt Bot command, or the Open Claw command if you live in the present.
03:26
Speaker A
And the first thing you want to do is go through onboarding, it is going to request that you read the security doc about all the risks involved, but I like to live dangerously.
03:36
Speaker A
So let's move right on to the next step by hooking up an AI model provider.
03:40
Speaker A
You can use anything you want here, but I'm going to go ahead and drop in my Anthropic API key, the Anthropic API does cost money, but you could easily use a free open source model here as well.
03:48
Speaker A
Now that that's done, the second major component is hooking up some kind of messenger app like Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, et cetera, I'm going to go with Telegram, which is really easy to set up.
03:58
Speaker A
Just open up your Telegram Messenger and start a chat with the BotFather, it'll have you select a name for your bot and then eventually give you an access token, which is like a password that you want to keep safe.
04:07
Speaker A
Go ahead and give the token to Molt Bot, then the next thing it'll ask you for is to configure some skills, it has a bunch of built-in skills or you can bring your own, and there's even a thing called Molt Hub with a bunch of other pre-built skills depending on what you want this thing to do.
04:19
Speaker A
And then finally, it'll ask you about hooks, hooks let you automate actions when agent commands are issued, example, save session context to memory when you issue new, learn more at docs.clawd.bot/hooks, which is really useful if you want it to keep memories about things that happen in previous sessions or trigger follow-up automations when something important happens.
05:13
Speaker A
That takes care of the initial setup, which then brings up this gateway dashboard where you can manage everything, it has an interface for basic chat along with tons of config settings to customize basically everything.
05:24
Speaker A
That's cool and all, but our goal is to use Molt Bot through Telegram, and to do that, we need to go into Telegram and send a message to the bot we created with the BotFather earlier, you'll notice initially it says access not configured and will respond with this pairing code.
05:37
Speaker A
What we have to do is take that pairing code, go into the terminal and run this command, and now we're good to go.
05:42
Speaker A
Now we can start sending messages and it will respond with Anthropic's Claude as the backend AI model, and now we can start refining its personality by simply chatting with it, I'll go ahead and name it Assistant to Jeff and tell it to behave like a casual gremlin with the fire emoji.
05:56
Speaker A
But what's really awesome is that we can now start building automations directly in the chat, like maybe I want to check in and see how my investment in Microsoft is doing, we can ask Molt Bot through Telegram and it turns out it's not doing so well, but it's not just going to pull this data once, we now have an automation set up in the background to keep track of this stock and when it moves significantly, we'll get a message on Telegram.
06:54
Speaker A
So now there's no need in my life to go check this stock manually.
06:59
Speaker A
But unfortunately, because I lost so much money in Microsoft, I now need to get a real job, so I might go ahead and install this skill that will automatically generate interview questions for software engineers.
07:09
Speaker A
But that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible here, it's an amazing tool you'll definitely want to try out.
07:13
Speaker A
Kind of like Tracer, the sponsor of today's video.
07:16
Speaker A
Tracer is an agent orchestration layer that makes your coding agents a lot better at building real-world software.
07:22
Speaker A
You start by telling it what you want to build, and Tracer's new Epic mode will ask you follow-up questions to create a series of specs and tickets, just like real engineering teams when they plan an epic, then it passes all of that context to your favorite coding agent and tracks the progress of each ticket in your sidebar.
07:37
Speaker A
Tracer uses a smart orchestration system called Bart Simpson that tracks what's actually happening under the hood and corrects agents the moment they drift instead of just blindly spamming more loops.
08:27
Speaker A
If you want to get more out of your coding agents in 2026, try out Tracer's new Epic mode for free with the link below.
08:33
Speaker A
This has been the Code Report, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
Topics:Open ClawClawd BotMolt BotAI assistantopen source AIAnthropic ClaudeGPT-5automationself-hosted AIdeveloper tools

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the current official name of the AI assistant discussed in the video, and what was its naming journey?

The AI assistant is currently called Open Claw. It was initially known as Clawd Bot, then briefly Molt Bot, before settling on Open Claw due to a naming dispute with Anthropic over its similarity to their Claude AI.

What are some of the key capabilities of Open Claw, and how does it operate?

Open Claw is an AI tool that takes action in the real world 24/7, remembering everything and communicating via Telegram or WhatsApp. It can manage calendars, clean emails, run scripts, analyze stock market losses, and deploy code, all while being self-hosted on devices like a Raspberry Pi or Mac Mini.

Who created Open Claw, and what is notable about its creator?

Open Claw was created by Peter Steinberger, the founder of PSPDFKit (aka Nutrient). He is known for his intense software obsession, having retired and then returned to provide this tool for free, which is written in TypeScript and wraps Claude and GPT-5.

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