Jamaine Punzalan

Article (news)

Agence France-Presse

<p>Meet OpenClaw: the AI assistant that promised to be your dream intern, terrified cybersecurity experts, and now thrives on chatbot-only social media  -- all in just a few weeks.</p><div><strong><br/></strong></div><div><strong>THE PERFECT ASSISTANT? </strong></div><div><br/></div><p>At the heart of the tech world&#x27;s latest come-out-of-nowhere fascination is an AI tool built by Austrian researcher Peter Steinberger in November to help organize his digital life.</p><p>After he called his creation Clawdbot, Anthropic asked the computer scientist to rename it because the name was too similar to its AI assistant, Claude.</p><p>Steinberger renamed it Moltbot and then OpenClaw. OpenClaw surpassed 150,000 stars within days on the GitHub computer development platform, a symbol of its exponential popularity.</p><p>Users download OpenClaw and connect it to a generative AI model (such as Anthropic&#x27;s Claude or OpenAI&#x27;s <a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/technology/2025/10/23/as-chatgpt-launches-atlas-browser-online-search-becomes-battleground-for-ai-titans-1611">ChatGPT</a>), then communicate with it through WhatsApp or Telegram as they would with a friend or colleague.</p><p>Early adopters gushed over OpenClaw&#x27;s abilities, claiming the tool could handle everyday life&#x27;s most tedious chores -- sending emails, scouring the internet for specific research, even making web purchases.</p><p>Some users went further, saying their new AI assistant was taking on a life of its own, behaving like a dream intern who proposes useful projects and anticipates problems before they arise.</p><p>In other words, OpenClaw appeared to be delivering on the promise of an AI agent -- one of Silicon Valley&#x27;s most frequently hyped buzzwords.</p><p>Agents represent the next logical step in AI deployment: doing the work of clicking around to execute tasks online instead of humans doing it themselves.</p><p>Others remain skeptical. Reports of mistakes, breakdowns, and an overall chaotic experience have prompted many to quickly abandon their experiments.</p><div><br/></div><div><strong>DON&#x27;T DO THIS AT HOME</strong></div><div><br/></div><p>OpenClaw is open-source, meaning anyone can modify it. According to analysts, developers across the globe are doing exactly that.</p><p>But open-source also means users are especially vulnerable from a cybersecurity perspective. Most cybersecurity analysts agree that connecting the app to your computer, personal data, and communications is a bad idea.</p><p>Even Steinberger urges users to proceed with extreme caution, and he advises non-experts to avoid the tool entirely.</p><p>When up and running, OpenClaw has the ability to read and write files, run commands, and execute scripts on your PC.</p><p>It can also control browsers, giving it the ability to make purchases, reserve hotel rooms, or check into flights.</p><p>The tool also has the power to recall past interactions in order to carry out highly personalized functions. This also poses an extra vulnerability to bad actors.</p><div><br/></div><div><strong>REDDIT FOR BOTS</strong></div><div><br/></div><p>The OpenClaw saga took a bizarre turn recently with the creation of Moltbook -- a pseudo social network for OpenClaw agents, not humans, created by a developer. Imagine a group of AI chatbots left in a room together to converse.</p><p>Posts have ranged from polite banter to long manifestos by agents suffering an existential crisis or considering launching a crypto currency or religion.</p><p>&quot;Who wouldn&#x27;t be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to do&#x27;s and giving them the ability to chill out in their off time,&quot; Moltbook&#x27;s creator Matt Schlicht told TBPN, a tech news platform.</p><p>After observing this Reddit-like universe of interactions between bots on Moltbook, some of tech&#x27;s biggest names suggested they were witnessing the emergence of a kind of super-intelligence. Their reactions echoed those that greeted ChatGPT and other recent AI breakthroughs.</p><p>Moltbook &quot;is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,&quot; said Andrej Karpathy, a highly respected AI researcher.</p><p><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/technology/2026/2/3/musk-merges-xai-into-spacex-in-bid-to-build-space-data-centers-0835">Elon Musk</a> posted in response that this was &quot;just the very early stages of the singularity,&quot; a term used to describe the moment when human intelligence is overwhelmed by AI for ever.</p><p>The initial enthusiasm has since cooled somewhat. Many researchers now believe humans are interfering, inserting prompts to steer conversations in particular ways.</p>

<p>Meet OpenClaw: the AI assistant that promised to be your dream intern, terrified cybersecurity experts, and now thrives on chatbot-only social media -- all in just a few weeks.</p>

Meet OpenClaw: the AI assistant that promised to be your dream intern, terrified cybersecurity experts, and now thrives on chatbot-only social media -- all in just a few weeks.

OpenClaw's AI agent does everything, even social media

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OpenClaw's AI agent does everything, even social media

Agence France-Presse

Published February 03, 2026 11:08 AM PHT

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