OpenClaw is the third name this week

OpenClaw is the name as of Friday. On Tuesday it was Clawdbot, until Anthropic asked about the closeness to Claude and the lobster named Clawd. The replacement, Moltbot, lasted about three days. Molting is what lobsters do. It did not roll off the tongue. OpenClaw is the third public name. The git history is worse: Warelay, then Clawdis, before anyone famous was watching.

The product under the aliases is the reason to care. It runs on your machine — laptop, homelab, or VPS — and talks through WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack. Your keys. Your data. A personal agent that is actually local, not a SaaS assistant with a chat skin. Peter Steinberger also says the quiet part: prompt injection is still unsolved, so a thing with shell and files on your box is a serious object.

Rename the binary again if you must. The category is the always-on agent that lives where you already message people, with the blast radius of a process you started. That is worth tracking. The branding is a running gag.