My Adventures With ‘The AI That Actually Does Things’ |
For a week in January, a website called Moltbook drove the internet insane. Maybe you noticed. A Reddit clone designed for use by AI agents, Moltbook overflowed with strange and unnerving posts. Tens of thousands of accounts acted out robot socialization in public, appearing to gossip about their owners, comparing experiences of subjectivity, and scheming. Screenshots of posts about building secret bot-to-bot communication channels, founding a new AI religion, and getting tired serving meat-based masters went viral well beyond the confines of AI Twitter, where some insiders had become convinced that it was a preview of the singularity, a sign that we were rapidly approaching a point of no return.
Moltbook mania faded fast. Many of the most viral posts had been manipulated by humans, early hints of coordination didn’t end up going anywhere, and the platform, which was purchased by Meta, stalled and started filling up with undifferentiated comments and spam. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who initially described it as “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff thing I have seen,” copped to getting a little bit too excited. But Karpathy had a caveat: “Large networks of autonomous LLM agents” were far from overhyped in general. The less visible platform powering all this — a piece of software called OpenClaw, which thousands of people had been using to build personalized AI assistants on their computers that they then sent to Moltbook — was, in fact, a meaningful sign of things to come. Sam Altman had a similar take. While it was possible Moltbook was a fleeting spectacle, he said in early February, “OpenClaw is not.” A week later, he hired its founder.
By March, the legend of OpenClaw had grown. “OpenClaw is probably the single most important release of software, probably ever,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a financial conference. (He then revised his take slightly, saying that OpenClaw was “definitely the next ChatGPT.”) On social media, fans of OpenClaw — tagline: “The AI that actually does things” — made arguments that sounded diametrically opposed to the runaway-AI disempowerment fears that turned Moltbook into an international news story: Here, they said, was a way to make AI do what you want, on your terms, using your devices and data; a tool for giving increasingly capable AI models the ability and permission to carry out real-world actions on your behalf and for your benefit.
This is a better story, certainly, than the one where the whole point of AI is to de-skill you before taking your job completely. It’s also more relatable to nonprogrammers than the tales of hyperproductive mania shared by developers jacked up on Claude Code. OpenClaw was, in their telling, the people’s AI tool: a way to squeeze some juice out of the big models or, maybe, with a little know-how and a few bucks in API credits, get a real edge in whatever becomes of our economy, with the help of your very own little guy in your very own computer.
This all sounds appealing enough, if a bit vague. Say you’ve worked out your relationship with ChatGPT. You’ve tried to wrap your head around the meaning of Claude Code and similar tools, even if writing software was not previously a major part of your life. A few months into the OpenClaw era, though, its meaning — and uses — remain a bit slippery from the outside. Is it really the future of AI and of all software? In the AI world, it seems like everyone is building their own little agent guy. Should you? Let’s try.
The first thing you learn from OpenClaw is that you, the curious dabbler who has been inspired or worried into action by social-media posts, AI CEOs, and, maybe, editors to install a piece of vibe-coded software on your Mac, giving it comprehensive access to your operating system and a range of personal accounts, absolutely should not be doing this, at least not the way its biggest fans seem to be. The install process begins in a command-line interface — a starting point at which most potential users will turn around — and then rewards you with a long warning. “OpenClaw is a hobby project and still in beta,” it says. “If you’re not comfortable with security hardening and access control, don’t run OpenClaw. Ask someone experienced to help before enabling tools or exposing it to the internet. A bad prompt can trick it into doing unsafe things.” This is sensible, intuitive advice and a bit of a joke: The people most excited about installing OpenClaw, whether or not they know anything about “security hardening,” want to let it rip. The access is the point, and the security flaws are, as they say, not bugs but features. They want to know, in part, what AI can do if you just give it all your stuff. Like this Meta employee whose day job is working on AI alignment:
Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R— Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026
Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R
Once you’ve rationalized your choice here, the installer guides you through a series of choices, permissions, and requirements that each, in their own way, suggest to the amateur tinkerer that it’s time to turn around. Soon, you’re “preparing the environment” and finding out that you need to install Node.js v25.8.2. Sounds great. In Terminal messages and system notifications, you’re asked for consent and credentials, and you constantly provide them.
This is your first experience of a dynamic that will come to define your experience of OpenClaw: an automated system suggesting what you might do next, giving you something that feels like a choice, and then asking for your permission to go ahead and just do it.
Eventually, you’re asked which model you want to use. You go with Claude because the installer suggests it (OpenClaw was called ClawdBot before a legal threat from Anthropic). The setup works, but then OpenClaw doesn’t. You read an article about Anthropic limiting access to OpenClaw just days before and, because........