Three days. That’s exactly what Clawdbot needs — an open-source AI assistant that promises to actually do things on your computer, not just chat — to go viral, explode, rebrand and emerge as Moltbot. Bruised but still breathing like a beloved crustacean.

If you’ve blinked in the past few days, you might have missed crypto scammers hijacking X accounts, a panicked founder who accidentally gave his personal GitHub handle to bots and a lobster mascot who briefly sprouted a frighteningly handsome human face. Oh, and somewhere in the chaos, the AI ​​developer Anthropic sent a polite email asking them to please, for the love of trademarks, change the name.

Welcome to Moltbot. Same AI assistant, new shell. And boy, does this lobster have some lore.

What is Moltbot? And why should you care?

Here’s the pitch that had tech X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) losing its mind: Imagine an AI assistant that doesn’t just chat; IT doing something. Real stuff. On your computer. Through the apps you use.

Moltbot lives where you actually communicate, like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack, Discord, Signal — you name it. You text it like you would text a friend, and it remembers your conversations from weeks ago and can send you active reminders. And if you give it permission, it can automate tasks, run commands and basically act like a digital personal assistant that can’t sleep. Unlike its founder.

Created by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer who sold his company PSPDFKit for around $119 million and then got tired of making it, Moltbot represents what many people think. Siri wish everyone. Not a voice-activated party trick, but an actual assistant that learns, remembers and gets things done. (CNET has reached out to Steinberger for comment on this story.)

Moltbot does not require any specific hardware to run, although the Mac Mini seems famous. The core idea is that Moltbot itself usually routes messages to AI companies’ servers and calls APIs, and the heavy AI work happens in whichever LLM you choose: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini.

Hardware it only becomes a bigger conversation if you want to run large local models or do heavy automation. That’s where powerful machines, like the Mac Mini, are often brought into the conversation. But that is not a requirement.

The project launched about three weeks ago and hit 9,000 stars on GitHub in 24 hours. By the time the dust settled late last week, it exceeded 60,000 stars, with all from AI researchers Andrej Karpathy to investors (and White House AI and crypto czar) David Sacks singing its praises. MacStories it’s called “the future of AI personal assistants.”

Then things got weird.

The name change that broke the internet (in about 10 seconds)

Maybe, over the weekend, Anthropic dropped by Steinberger’s inbox to point out that “Clawd” (helper’s name) and “Clawdbot” (the project’s name) are probably very similar to the AI ​​itself, Claude.

“As a trademark owner, we have an obligation to protect our marks — so we’ve reached out directly to the maker of Clawdbot about this,” a representative from Anthropic said in an emailed statement to CNET.

By means of 3:38 am US Eastern Time on Tuesday, Steinberger made his call: “@Moltbot it is.”

What happened next, according to Steinberger’s posts on X and the MoltBot blog, was like a digital heist movie, except everyone was a bot and the getaway cars were social media handles.

Within seconds — literally, seconds — automated bots snipped the @clawdbot handle. The squatter then posted a crypto wallet address. Meanwhile, in a sleep-deprived panic, Steinberger accidentally renamed his personal GitHub account instead of the organization’s account. The bots took the “steipete” before he could blink. He said both crises required him to call contacts at X and GitHub to make fixes.

Then there’s what the creators call “the Handsome Molty incident.” Steinberger instructed Molty (the AI) to redesign his own icon. In a memorable attempt to make the mascot look “5 years older,” the AI ​​created a human face grafted onto the lobster’s body. The internet has turned it into a meme (a la Squidward is handsome) within minutes.

Fake profiles claiming to be “Head of Engineering at Clawdbot” thwart crypto schemes. A fake $CLAWD cryptocurrency briefly hit a $16 million market cap before crashing more than 90%. “Any project that lists me as the owner of the coin is a SCAM,” Steinberger posted on Xenraged, to thousands of confused followers.

What made Clawdbot go viral

Take away the chaos, and Moltbot is truly impressive.

MANY AI tools exactly the same. You open a website, type a question or question, wait for it to generate, copy the answer, paste it somewhere else, etc., etc. Moltbot wants to flip that script by having the assistant inside your existing conversations. You’re already on WhatsApp or iMessage, so why not just text them like you would text a coworker?

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The killer features? Well, there are three main things.

For one, go ahead memory. Moltbot doesn’t forget everything when you close the app. It knows your preferences, tracks ongoing projects and actually remembers your conversation on Tuesday.

There are also proactive notifications. It can message you first when something important happens, such as daily briefings, deadline reminders and email test summaries. You can wake up to a text that says, “Here are your three priorities today,” without having to ask the AI ​​first.

Finally, there is true automation. Depending on your setup, it can schedule tasks, fill out forms, organize files, search your email, generate reports and control smart home devices. People report using it for everything from inbox cleaning to research threads that span days, and from habit tracking to automated weekly recaps of what they send. The use cases seem to continue to increase because once it is wired into your actual tools (calendar, notes, email), it stops feeling like software and just part of your routine.

Should you use this item?

Time for a real conversation. Moltbot is not a polished, enterprise-ready product with vendor support and compliance paperwork — that is something Steinberger admits. It’s a fast-moving, open-source project that recently endured a near-death experience involving trademark lawyers, crypto scammers and disaster-exposed databases. Whew.

So, you might be wondering, with all this hoopla, if Moltbot is something you should try. Sure, this tool remembers information for weeks, works between apps and systems and provides proactive notifications. But it has rough edges. This is not a tool for you if you need something that “just works” and there are no complicated installation steps.

And you probably don’t want to pursue it if you don’t want to think about — and don’t really understand — cybersecurity.

The Little Lobster That Growled (And Continued)

the official Moltbot lore explains it simply: “Molting is what lobsters do to grow.” They shed their old shell and come out bigger.

Moltbot is the same software as Clawdbot, offering the same impressive engineering and vision of what AI personal assistants can be. But the past almost 72 hours have forced it to grow rapidly, face security vulnerabilities, prevent authentication, and realize that viral success attracts not only users but scammers, squatters and, yes, intellectual property lawyers.

Through it all, Moltbot still stands. Discord still sounding. GitHub’s stars continue to rise. And somewhere in Vienna (or maybe London), Peter Steinberger is probably still fielding DMs from people asking if he’s launching a crypto token. (He’s not. Please stop asking.)

Want to try Moltbot yourself? Go to molt.bot for documentation, installation guides and, most importantly, a security checklist.

Maybe just use a spare laptop. And definitely don’t name your project after someone else’s branded AI model. Turns out it’s important.