Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. “You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment," he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. “Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts.”
Grad isn’t the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic AI tool, which was briefly known as MoltBot and is now named OpenClaw. A Meta executive says he recently told his team to keep OpenClaw off their regular work laptops or risk losing their jobs. The executive told reporters he believes the software is unpredictable and could lead to a privacy breach if used in otherwise secure environments. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.
Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw’s solo founder, launched it as a free, open source tool last November. But its popularity surged last month as other coders contributed features and began sharing their experiences using it on social media. Last week, Steinberger joined ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which says it will keep OpenClaw open source and support it through a foundation.