Good Morning,
In the history of AI January 2026 will go down as a time when a lot of incredible Chinese open-weight models came out. But X was distracting us trying to hype up AI agents with the OpenClaw spectacle. I wonder why that is? And could the two be somehow related?
This project was “everywhere all at once” and it didn’t seem like a genuine thing. This happens when Silicon Valley (or China) is doing PR campaigns on X, which is among the most bot ridden and synthetic of social media platforms now.
But is it even useful and what are we even talking about? OpenClaw is a viral, open-source personal AI assistant designed to act as a "24/7 digital chief of staff."
OpenClaw was developer Peter Steinberger (founder of PSPDFKit) in late 2025, it has quickly become one of the fastest-growing projects on GitHub, surpassing 100,000 stars in just two months. First called Clawbot, after a subsequent legal challenge from Claude’s maker, Anthropic, it had briefly rebranded as Moltbot, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.
As of February 2nd, it has over 147k stars on its Github. These projects sometimes take a life of their own as with the case of Lovable, what was formerly called GPT Engineer. It’s safe to say that “OpenClaw” has emerged as one of the most talked-about tools in early 2026 so far.
View OpenClaw documentation.
It has a Discord of about 60k, many of which are online.
Its X account has over 230k followers.
What should we make of the speed of adoption though?
“OpenClaw is an open agent platform that runs on your machine and works from the chat apps you already use. WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Teams—wherever you are, your AI assistant follows.”
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the phenomenon “genuinely the most incredible:
This project has delivered some of the most cringe clickbait titles so far in 2026 too. So yes, The OpenClaw community has already spawned creative offshoots, including Moltbook — a social network where AI assistants can interact with each other.
Ever since the vibe-coding fad faded badly at the end of 2025, you knew Silicon Valley (or China) would try to hype up AI agents yet again. And no, I don’t want to read Agent swarms pretending they are doing Reddit.
Do we even want virtual autonomous agents creating their own mayhem on the web? With access to our private communications? What could possibly go wrong. In a short period, this fad caused Mac Minis to sell out globally. Security researchers found exposed instances leaking credentials. Crypto scammers launched fake tokens. For what? In my view AI agents failed spectacularly in 2025.
Sudden ascension on social media isn’t organic any longer, everything is manufactured. OpenClaw runs directly on users’ operating systems and applications and that’s obviously a security nightmare in this case if you don’t take precautions. The idea that Steinberger is some sort of Austrian genius that just happend to work on this after selling his company recently is baffling to me.
According to a message posted on Discord by one of OpenClaw’s top maintainers, who goes by the nickname of Shadow, “if you can’t understand how to run a command line, this is far too dangerous of a project for you to use safely. This isn’t a tool that should be used by the general public at this time.”
Do we want Agents on our Comms Apps?
Early integrations have primarily been on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord, allowing users to control the agent through text commands.
OpenClaw made Cloudflare’s stock surge 14%, seemingly solely because the chatbot uses Cloudflare’s infrastructure to connect with commercial models. Cloudflare rushed to introduce Moltworker a few days ago. Moltworker is an open-source project and middleware solution released by Cloudflare in late January 2026.
Why users like OpenClaw?
A key feature is its “persistent memory,” which allows the agent to recall past interactions over weeks and adapt to user habits to carry out hyper-personalized functions.
OpenClaw could become a gateway for using Chinese models. They recently added Support for KIMI K2.5 & Xiaomi MiMo-V2-Flash.
“OpenClaw’s open-source nature has likely helped drive adoption by enabling users to build new app integrations. The software itself is free, with users paying only for the costs of running the underlying language model.”
Going Viral
OpenClaw has now started to accept sponsors, with lobster-themed tiers ranging from “krill” ($5/month) to “poseidon” ($500/month).
Beijing is also very interested in OpenClaw where OpenClaw can also be paired with Chinese-developed language models, such as DeepSeek, and configured to work with Chinese messaging apps through customized setups. The Chinese developer community seems very active here.
Most of the open-weight models that power Open-Source AI are highly likely to come from China.
OpenClaw is also being gamed with influencers and builders who have already made a lot of money via AI. Path’s Dave Morin and Ben Tossell, who sold his company Makerpad to Zapier in 2021 are fairly noticeable.
What can I say, I’m skeptical, I’m not of the claw. Nor do I believe AI agents are adding real economic value in most cases. While AI coding is becoming more capable, and it’s impacting how the biggest Tech companies in the world operate and redsign some roles, I’m not personally a huge fan yet of vibe-coding or AI agents.
What do you make of viral OpenClaw? Is China hacking us with an interface to popularize its models or is it something else.
Open-Weight AI Supremacy on-Ramp
One thing is clear, Chinese Open-weight models are only going to get better in reasoning around agentic tasks and I expect many new products to emerge.
The Open-Weight Deluge of 2026 so far
It’s all China:
Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2.5 Model
Qwen released Qwen3-Max-Thinking
DeepSeek’s new paper (mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections) and expected coding model in three weeks time. DeepSeek-R2 likely in March.
MiniMax Agent (desktop) - An AI-native workspace.
Qwen’s DeepPlanning Benchmark. - Read about it (measures long-horizon agent planning)
Qwen3-ASR & ForcedAligner (Jan 28, 2026)
Zhipu AI / Z.ai’s GLM-4.7 (free/open version released January 19, 2026)
DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-OCR 2 (released January 27, 2026) - read Paper.
Qwen3-TTS (Jan 21, 2026)
Engram Architecture February, 2026: DeepSeek V4 (Expected mid-February): While not fully launched yet, technical papers and final "teasers" for V4 were released.
Likely Trojan Horse Event 🦄
Conclusion: high chance OpenClaw is actually a Chinese backed product. A Trojan horse for their models to become more popular. This is not the M.O of Silicon Valley. China’s thriving open-weight LLM ecosystem has the most to gain from this.
The way things are going it might take AI agents years to automate useful tasks for most citizens and consumers.
Who knows what kind of computing architectures will be using by then.
Yeah, what could go wrong?!
Yet again, humans succumb to their insatiable demand for convenience by opening their door willingly to a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Thanks for sharing this. Appreciate you ✌️