The viral personal AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name — too. After a legal challenge from Claude’s creator, Anthropic, it was briefly rebranded as Moltbot, but now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.

The latest name change was not prompted by Anthropic, which declined to comment. But this time, Clawdbot’s original creator Peter Steinberger made sure to avoid copyright issues from the start. “I got someone to help research trademarks for OpenClaw and also asked OpenAI for permission just to be sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.

“The lobster has dissolved into its final form,” Steinberger wrote in a blog post. Molting — the process by which lobsters grow — also inspired OpenClaw’s previous name, but Steinberger admits in X that short-lived moniker “never grew” on him, and others agreed.

This quick name change highlights the youth of the project, even though it has attracted more than 100,000 stars on GitHub (a measure of the popularity of the software development platform) in just two months. According to Steinberger, OpenClaw’s new name is a nod to its roots and community. “This project has grown beyond what I can sustain alone,” he wrote.

The OpenClaw community has already developed creative branches, including Moltbook – a social network where AI assistants can interact with each other. The platform has attracted a lot of attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the event “really the most amazing sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I saw recently,” as “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) organize themselves into a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, for example how to talk privately.”

British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the internet today” in a Friday’s blog post. On the platform, AI agents share information on subjects from automating Android phones through remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform works through a system of skills, or downloadable instruction files that tell OpenClaw assistants how to interact with the network. Willison noted that agents posted on forums called “Submolts” and even had a built-in mechanism to check the site every four hours for updates, although he warned that “getting and following instructions from the internet” has security risks.

Steinberger took a break afterward exiting his former company PSPDFkitbut “came back from retirement to mess with AI,” according to his X bio. Clawdbot stems from personal projects he’s worked on in the past, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo effort. “I added some people from the open source community to the list of maintainers this week,” he told TechCrunch.

That additional support will be key for OpenClaw to reach its full potential. Its ambition is to allow users to have an AI assistant running on their own computer and working from the chat apps they already use. But until its security is improved, it’s still not a good idea to run it outside of a controlled environment, let alone give it access to your main Slack or WhatsApp accounts.

Steinberger is well aware of these concerns, and thanked “all the security people for their hard work in helping us get the project off the ground.” Commenting on OpenClaw’s roadmap, he wrote that “security remains our priority” and noted that the latest version, released with the rebrand, already includes some improvements on the front.

Even with outside help, there are problems that are too big for OpenClaw to solve on its own, such as easy injection, where a malicious message can trick AI models into taking unintended actions. “Remember that easy injection is still an unsolved industry problem,” Steinberger wrote, while directing users to a set of security best practices.

These security best practices require significant technical expertise, which reinforces that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early tinkerers, not early adopters lured by the promise of an “AI assistant that does things.” As the hype around the project grew, Steinberger and his supporters became more vocal in their warnings.

According to a message posted on Discord by one of OpenClaw’s leading maintainers, nicknamed Shadow, “if you don’t understand how to run a command line, it’s too dangerous a project for you to use safely. It’s not a tool that the general public should use at this time.

Truly going mainstream will take time and money, and OpenClaw is now accepting sponsors, with lobster-themed tiers ranging from “krill” ($5/month) to “poseidon” ($500/month). But its sponsorship page explains that Steinberger “does not retain sponsorship funds.” Instead, he is now “thinking about how to properly pay the maintainers — full-time if possible.”

Perhaps helped by Steinberger’s pedigree and vision, OpenClaw’s list of sponsors includes software engineers and entrepreneurs who have founded and built other notable projects, such as Path’s Dave Morin and Ben Tossell, who sold his company Makerpad to Zapier in 2021.

Tossell, who now describes himself as a tinkerer and investor, sees value in putting the potential of AI in people’s hands. “We need to support people like Peter who are building open source tools that anyone can get and use,” he told TechCrunch.