IronClaw is a security-first reimplementation of OpenClaw by Near AI, designed around the principle that untrusted tools should never have direct access to the host system. Every tool that IronClaw executes runs inside an isolated WebAssembly container, providing hardware-level sandboxing without the overhead of full virtual machines. Tool capabilities must be explicitly granted — nothing is permitted by default.
The security model is comprehensive: capability-based permissions control what each tool can access, endpoint allowlisting restricts network calls to pre-approved destinations, credential injection provides secrets to tools without exposing them in environment variables or config files, and leak detection monitors for unauthorized data exfiltration. Rate limiting is built in at the tool level, preventing runaway agents from exhausting quotas or budgets. For the highest-trust deployments, IronClaw supports Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) for cryptographic attestation of agent behavior.
IronClaw runs on Linux and macOS across both ARM and x86 architectures, making it deployable on everything from Apple Silicon development machines to AWS Graviton servers. It’s actively maintained by Near AI and targets enterprise and regulated-environment deployments where OpenClaw’s default trust model is insufficiently restrictive. In the security tooling landscape alongside SecureClaw and ClawSec, IronClaw takes the most radical approach — rebuilding the entire execution model from first principles rather than adding security layers to an existing runtime.