OpenClaw is the core AI assistant gateway created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. Originally published as Clawdbot in November 2025, renamed to Moltbot on January 27 2026, then renamed to OpenClaw three days later after Anthropic raised trademark concerns.
Running as a single Node.js Gateway process on 127.0.0.1:18789, OpenClaw connects to 50+ messaging platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, WeChat, Matrix, and many more. It is one of the fastest-growing open-source repositories in history, reaching 100,000 stars in just two days.
The project was transferred to the OpenClaw Foundation in February 2026. As of late March 2026 it has approximately 337,000 GitHub stars and 66,000 forks, with the current version being 2026.3.24.
Licensed under MIT. Supported platforms include macOS, Linux, and Windows (WSL2).