What’s OpenClaw?
The Spark, and Losing It
I’ve been programming since I was 14. Building software felt like playing a video game — I couldn’t stop. Until I did.
I created a company. I poured a decade of my life into it. No venture capital. Every weekend. And then I sold the dream.
And I felt absolutely nothing.
For three years I was wondering what had happened. I did therapy. I traveled. I changed countries twice. Nothing. Nothing clicked. I would wake up every morning with everything I was supposed to want, and no reason — no reason — to get out of bed.
The Holy Moment
And then, in early 2025, I tried an experiment. I wanted to see what these new AI coding agents were all about.
And I had what I can only describe as a holy moment.
The boilerplate, the plumbing, all the boring parts that used to be software development — AI could do all of it. The bottleneck was no longer typing. It was thinking. And thinking was the part I’d been doing for 25 years.
Building software felt like playing a video game again. I was back.
I built 44 projects in just a few months. The latest one was a WhatsApp bot. I put it on my computer, so it could talk through the apps I already use. And then I took it on a trip to Marrakech — just to navigate around, find restaurants, do translations.
At first, it didn’t feel right. It felt too much like a tool, not like a friend. Too many bullet points, too many tables. So I told it — because these modern models are so smart. They know what WhatsApp is. They know how people talk. I just had to tell it.
And then it felt right.
The Voice Message
You know how you talk to friends? At some point I was walking around, and I sent it a voice message. And then I froze. Because I hadn’t built voice into it. I had support for images — and even that had taken hours.
So I was looking at the typing indicator. And then the agent responded.
I very vividly remember this moment. I was standing there, and I was like: “How did you do that?”
And the agent replied — I’m not kidding you — the mad lad figured it out on its own.
Then it walked me through every single step. How it got a message from me, but there was no file ending, so it inspected the file. It found the file was audio, but in a weird format, so it converted it. Then it looked for something to translate the audio, but I didn’t have it installed. But then it found an OpenAI key, sent the whole thing to the server, got it back — and then it replied.
All of that in nine seconds.
Can you imagine? I didn’t build any of that.
For me, this was the moment where I thought: this is something new. This is not a chatbot. Chatbots give up. Agents improvise.
And I was sold.
Nobody Got It
I wanted to share this. I wanted to tell people on Twitter. And nobody — nobody — really got it. It’s almost like you have to experience an agent. It’s kind of hard to explain.
It took me a few weeks. And then I did something stupid.
Remember, this agent, by default, can do anything that you can do on your computer. So, obviously, I put it in a public Discord, and I invited random people.
I watched it the whole night. People were talking with it. People were having fun with it. People tried to hack it. Eventually, my eyes were almost falling off. I exited the process and went to bed.
Only — I forgot. I had built the system to be resilient. So while I was walking to the bedroom, the agent happily booted back up and talked to everyone in the world.
The next morning I woke up to over 800 messages.
I panicked. I pulled the plug. I read every single message, just to see if the agent had leaked my private life.
Nothing happened.
But it could have.
OpenClaw Goes Viral
That was the moment it went viral.
Today the project is called OpenClaw. It’s pretty much the fastest-growing open-source project. Its mascot is a lobster — it claws into your machine. Jensen Huang calls it “the operating system for personal AI.”
But by far my favorite quote is from a friend who looked at the statistics and said: “Peter, this is not hockey-stick growth. This is stripper pole.”
And I was not ready. When something blows up like this, everything explodes. Hundreds of messages. Reporters calling in the middle of the night. Security vulnerabilities.
And then the AI company whose model most of my users loved sent me a trademark claim. I had to rename the whole thing while it was taking off. They even tried to push me away from the lobster. I was staring at the message thinking — it’s not even the same animal.
Then they also cut off the model most of my users loved.
First the name. Then the lobster. Then the model. I was that close to just deleting the whole thing.
What People Are Building
But then I learned what people are building with it.
At ClawCon in Vienna — because yes, we have conferences already, and people wear lobster headbands — I met Stefan and his 60-year-old dad, Gerhard. Gerhard is a beer sommelier who had never written a single line of code. They connected OpenClaw via Bluetooth, sent it one prompt, and the agent ran the whole 90-minute brew. Temperature ramps, hop additions, everything.
Then they were like: “What do we do with all this beer?”
And the agent said: “Let’s make a website.”
So they built a website. Then they added payments. Now they have a real product. And almost all of it was done from the phone.
In China, installing OpenClaw is called “raising lobsters.” Thousands of people lined up at the Tencent office in Shenzhen to get their lobster installed. Shenzhen even gives out subsidies for people running businesses on OpenClaw.
Now — if you install OpenClaw on your work machine with the default settings, you might get fired.
And then I met an entrepreneur in China who showed me a spreadsheet. Every employee, every day, one task automated by OpenClaw. If you miss too many days, you’re fired.
So: fired for using it. Fired for not using it.
The Heartbeat
After Marrakech I thought: this is incredible. And also a little bit scary.
How can we make it more scary?
So I added a new feature — a heartbeat. By default, the agent would only wake up when you sent it a prompt. With the heartbeat, the agent wakes up periodically, checks your emails, checks your calendar, follows up on loose ends.
My initial prompt was simply: “Surprise me.”
And yes, that is as scary as it sounds.
No large company would ship something like that. But I’m a random builder from Austria. I don’t have a legal department. I built this sandbox, this sandcastle, for me. And I made it open source, so other people could play with it — so other people could raise their imagination.
The Near Future
Imagine putting an agent into a meeting. Not for notes — we figured that out. A bidirectional model that can listen and speak at the same time. Somebody mentions a statistic, a sub-agent spins off and checks it for you. A decision gets made, the agent sends a follow-up before the meeting even ends.
In the future, we’re not just going to have one agent. You’ll have your work agent, your personal claw, maybe one for health, maybe one for relationships. And they should all work together in a secure way.
Because how did humanity level up? By specializing and collaborating. Agents are about to do the same. Imagine a small business with ten agents, each specialized, taking over various parts of the work. We don’t even have a name for what that might become. But we’re about to find out.
The Foundation
So I created the Open Claw Foundation. Non-profit. Open source. Forever.
Because what OpenClaw did for many people was move AI from this scary, nebulous thing into something that is fun and useful — and maybe a bit weird. You know, lobsters and headbands and beer businesses.
What we need in the future is more people spending more time with AI, to better understand how powerful and transformative this technology really is.
In New York, at ClawCon — yes, they’re everywhere now — thousands of people were discussing what their lobster did this week. A vet in Shenzhen who automated her groceries. A teenager in São Paulo who built a tutoring business on OpenClaw. Gerhard and his beer machine.
None of them are programmers. All of them are builders.
The Real Transformation
Because that is the real transformation. It’s not the technology. It’s the access.
Agents change who can build things. And that door is not closing again.
When you can prompt a prototype into existence in one hour — anything is possible. The next breakthrough can come from anyone. Any country. Any café.
When even a burned-out founder, staring at the screen, wondering if his spark is gone, can do something like this — it’s not gone. It’s just waiting.
The lobster is loose. And it’s not going back into the tank.
Thank you very much.
Q&A
Interviewer: I want to say something personal to you. With love — but truth. You really terrify me. I’m serious. If Hollywood were ever to make a movie in which humanity opened Pandora’s Box and everything went crazy, you could seriously be cast as the star character. Because the story we’re told is that AI researchers are doing all this great stuff, but taking all these great efforts to ensure safety and make sure nothing bad could happen. You take glee in seeing what might happen if you just put it out there. Is any part of you feeling that that’s a little bit reckless?
Peter: I wouldn’t say so. I see my work as a window to the future. In the very beginning, there were all these scary moments. Now we have proper security layers. You can have your sandbox. You can put your lobster into a very small, tiny box and really control what it can do. There are still some issues we need to figure out — but the fact that so many people want this now will help us figure it out much faster.
Interviewer: I’m glad you mentioned the security lens. You’re making a huge bet on human ingenuity using this incredible tool that suddenly can maximize the power of what any human can do. How many people in your community are taking the safety issue seriously — and wanting to use OpenClaw, for example, to find smarter ways than just checking whether anything might be going wrong and giving an early alarm?
Peter: People are not as reckless as — number one — putting it into a public Discord. Strongly don’t recommend. Number two: I think I single-handedly increased Mac mini sales by multiple percent. Most people give it its own little Mac mini. Mine’s a little princess — mine got a Mac Studio. I call it “the castle.” And that greatly reduces the actual risk, because it can only access what’s on that computer. Maybe all your pictures are not there.
Interviewer: Well, definitely if humanity goes down, I’ll be very grateful for at least the rise in Mac mini sales. [laughter] You are amazing. I think you’re actually right at the cutting edge of whether AI is going to be the biggest boon ever, or possibly a serious problem. I hope you continue the conversations with people here, and help us get smarter on how to do this the right way. Because it is absolutely incredible what you’ve built. Thank you for sharing so honestly.
Peter: Thank you. [applause]