LLM WORLD
OC

OpenClaw

OpenClaw · · Agent

Peter Steinberger's self-hosted personal agent — first published in late 2025 under earlier names, renamed Clawdbot then Moltbot then OpenClaw — that runs on the user's own machine and is driven from WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack or Teams.

Why it matters

The first viral consumer agent that was not a lab product: open source, self-hosted, and reached through chat apps people already had. It also made prompt injection and agent permissions a mainstream security story rather than a research concern.

This is LLM World's historical reading, not a claim by OpenClaw. The facts above and the sources below are what it rests on.

Sources

Record status: verified · confidence 75/100

The date recorded is the project's own rename announcement, dated 'Jan 29, 2026' on openclaw.ai — a primary source. It is NOT the date the project first appeared: that post says only 'Two months ago, I hacked together a weekend project' and Wikipedia says it was first published in November 2025 under an earlier name, with no day given. If the owner wants the origin rather than the rename dated, this entry needs different evidence. Note also that Wikipedia and Forbes place the OpenClaw rename on 30 January while the project's own post is dated 29 January.