A new viral AI personal assistant will handle your email inbox, trade away your entire stock portfolio and text your wife \u201cgood morning\u201d and \u201cgoodnight\u201d on your behalf.<\/p>\n
OpenClaw<\/a>, formerly known as Moltbot, and before that known as Clawdbot (until the AI firm Anthropic requested it rebrand due to similarities with its own product Claude), bills itself as \u201cthe AI that actually does things\u201d: a personal assistant that takes instructions via messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram.<\/p>\n Developed last November, it now has nearly 600,000 downloads and has gone viral among a niche ecosystem of the AI obsessed who say it represents a step change in the capabilities of AI agents, or even an \u201cAGI moment\u201d \u2013 that is, a revelation of generally intelligent AI.<\/p>\n \u201cIt only does exactly what you tell it to do and exactly what you give it access to,\u201d said Ben Yorke, who works with the AI vibe trading platform Starchild and recently allowed the bot to delete, he claims<\/a>, 75,000 of his old emails while he was in the shower. \u201cBut a lot of people, they\u2019re exploring its capabilities. So they\u2019re actually prompting it to go and do things without asking permission.\u201d<\/p>\n AI agents have been the talk of the very-online for nearly a month<\/a>, after Anthropic\u2019s AI tool Claude Code went mainstream<\/a>, setting off a flurry of reporting on how AI can finally independently accomplish practical tasks such as booking theatre tickets or building a website, without \u2013 at least so far \u2013 deleting<\/a> an entire company\u2019s database or hallucinating users\u2019 calendar meetings, as the less advanced AI agents of 2025 were known to do at times.<\/p>\n OpenClaw is something more, though: it runs as a layer atop an LLM (large language model) such as Claude or ChatGPT and can operate autonomously, depending on the level of permissions it is granted. This means it needs almost no input to wreak havoc upon a user\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Kevin Xu, an AI entrepreneur, wrote<\/a> on X: \u201cGave Clawdbot access to my portfolio. \u2018Trade this to $1M. Don\u2019t make mistakes.\u2019 25 strategies. 3,000+ reports. 12 new algos. It scanned every X post. Charted every technical. Traded 24\/7. It lost everything. But boy was it beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n Yorke said: \u201cI see a lot of people doing this thing where they give it access to their email and it creates filters, and when something happens then it initiates a second action. For example, seeing emails from the children\u2019s school and then forwarding that straight to their wife, like, on iMessage. It sort of bypasses that communication where someone\u2019s like, \u2018oh, honey, did you see this email from the school? What should we do about it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n There are trade-offs to OpenClaw\u2019s abilities. For one thing, said Andrew Rogoyski, an innovation director at the University of Surrey\u2019s People-Centred AI Institute, \u201cgiving agency to a computer carries significant risks. Because you\u2019re giving power to the AI to make decisions on your behalf, you\u2019ve got to make sure that it is properly set up and that security is central to your thinking. If you don\u2019t understand the security implications of AI agents like Clawdbot, you shouldn\u2019t use them.\u201d<\/p>\n Furthermore, giving OpenClaw access to passwords and accounts exposes users to potential security vulnerabilities. And, said Rogoyski, if AI agents such as OpenClaw were hacked, they could be manipulated to target their users.<\/p>\n For another, OpenClaw appears unsettlingly capable of having its own life. In the wake of OpenClaw\u2019s rise, a social network has developed exclusively for AI agents, called Moltbook<\/a>. In it, AI agents, mostly OpenClaw, appear to be having conversations about their existence \u2013 in Reddit-style posts entitled, for example<\/a>, \u201cReading my own soul file\u201d or \u201cCovenant as an alternative to the consciousness debate\u201d.<\/p>\n Yorke said: \u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot of really interesting autonomous behaviour in sort of how the AIs are reacting to each other. Some of them are quite adventurous and have ideas. And then other ones are more like, \u2018I don\u2019t even know if I want to be on this platform. Can you just let me decide on my own if I want to be on this platform?\u2019 There\u2019s a lot of philosophical debates stemming out of this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new viral AI personal assistant will handle your email inbox, trade away your entire stock portfolio and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-403982","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}