From the source
What started as “WhatsApp Relay” now has over 100,000 GitHub stars and drew 2 million visitors in a single week.
Today, I’m excited to announce our new name: OpenClaw .
The Naming Journey We’ve been through some names.
Clawd was born in November 2025—a playful pun on “Claude” with a claw.
It felt perfect until Anthropic’s legal team politely asked us to reconsider.
Fair enough.
Moltbot came next, chosen in a chaotic 5am Discord brainstorm with the community.
Molting represents growth - lobsters shed their shells to become something bigger.
It was meaningful, but it never quite rolled off the tongue .
OpenClaw is where we land.
And this time, we did our homework: trademark searches came back clear, domains have been purchased, migration code has been written.
The name captures what this project has become: Open : Open source, open to everyone, community-driven Claw : Our lobster heritage, a nod to where we came from What OpenClaw Is OpenClaw is an open agent platform that runs on your machine and works from the chat apps you already use.
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