What are Clawdbot, Moltbot and OpenClaw?

Clawdbot, Moltbot and OpenClaw are one project. Three names, one Gateway, one lobster. If a 2025 gist says npm i -g clawdbot, you want openclaw in 2026.

I keep writing this sentence because Google still serves all three, ClawHub still has skills whose README was last saved under the middle name, and every week someone in our support queue pastes a Windows installer from a GitHub user who did not exist in November. I build Social by InstantDM — a scheduler with a hosted MCP server that this agent can call. I am not the OpenClaw Foundation. I am the person who has to answer “does your skill work with Moltbot” without rolling my eyes.

The project is a self-hosted personal assistant. You install it. A background Gateway talks to WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage and a pile of others. You bring a model key. It is MIT-licensed. It is not a social media scheduler, and it never was, under any of the three names. Full definition: What is OpenClaw in 2026?.

This page is the rename, the search mess, the installers that showed up while the name was moving, and the one thing that did not change: how you actually publish.

OpenClaw homepage at openclaw.ai, with the lobster mascot and the line "The AI that really does things." OpenClaw homepage at openclaw.ai — current name, same lobster. Captured 27 August 2026.

What is the exact rename timeline?

The public sequence is short enough to put in a table, and messy enough that late-January writeups mashed four stories into one.

DateName on the boxWhat actually happened
24 Nov 2025Warelay → Clawd → ClawdbotPeter Steinberger ships a WhatsApp-to-agent weekend project. The Clawdbot name sticks.
Dec 2025 – mid Jan 2026ClawdbotWord of mouth, Discord, early skills. Config lives under clawdbot-shaped paths.
26 Jan 2026ClawdbotPeak of the first hype cycle. Tutorials still say clawdbot.
~27 Jan 2026MoltbotRename under Anthropic trademark pressure. Molty the lobster becomes the joke that is also the brand.
27–29 Jan 2026Moltbot, plus everything elseClawHavoc reports of 341 malicious skills hit the registry in the same news window. Moltbook, a separate agent social network, launches. CVE patches start shipping.
30 Jan 2026OpenClawThird name. GitHub stars explode over about 48 hours. The OpenClaw Foundation is the steward.
27 Aug 2026OpenClawopenclaw/openclaw shows 387,774 stars and 81,423 forks. That is the number I checked.

Treat any article dated 27–31 January 2026 as a firehose. Rename, security, Moltbook, and GitHub records all arrived in the same four days. The software you run today is OpenClaw. The folder is ~/.openclaw. The CLI is openclaw. The site is openclaw.ai. The docs are docs.openclaw.ai.

If you only remember one row: 30 January 2026 is when the name settled. Everything after that is the current product. Everything before that is the same binary wearing a different sticker.

Why did the name change twice?

Clawdbot sat too close to Claude. Anthropic objected. That is the whole first rename.

I do not have the legal letters, and I do not need them. “Clawd” as a wink at Claude was funny in a weekend repo and expensive the moment the thing had a real install base. Trademark complaints are not taste debates. You pick a new name or you fight. Steinberger picked a new name.

Moltbot leaned into the molt/lobster joke. Crustaceans molt. The assistant sheds a shell. Molty the space lobster is still on the docs. The name lasted days, not months. Two things made it a bad place to stop:

  1. Search collision with Moltbook. A different product, launched in the same window, with a one-letter difference and the same meme energy. People already could not tell Clawdbot from Claude. Adding Moltbot vs Moltbook was not a gift.
  2. The security news landed on the same desk. When researchers started talking about malicious ClawHub skills, journalists needed a noun. A brand that had existed for 72 hours is a bad noun.

OpenClaw is the name the Foundation kept. It is generic enough to survive a lawyer and specific enough that openclaw is a CLI people can type. Molty survived. The lobster on the homepage is not a second product. It is branding.

If a thread still argues about whether “they sold out” or “Anthropic was being petty,” you can skip it. The rename is done. Your job is to type the current package name.

What was Moltbot, in practical terms?

Moltbot was OpenClaw between roughly 27 January and 30 January 2026. Same process, same port default (18789), same idea of a Gateway plus channels plus skills. If you onboarded during those days, you may still have screenshots that say Moltbot. The bits on disk should have moved to ~/.openclaw. If they did not, you have a museum directory, not a second assistant.

What Moltbot was not:

  • A fork with different ethics
  • A hosted SaaS
  • A social network
  • A publisher for Instagram
  • A reason to re-OAuth every account

I still get “we migrated from Moltbot to OpenClaw, do we need a new API key?” No. Our MCP server never keyed off the agent’s marketing name. The key is a workspace key. The agent is a client. Clients get renamed. Keys do not.

If your old notes say moltbot mcp add, the current command family is openclaw mcp. Flags move with releases; openclaw mcp --help wins. Walkthrough: Add the hosted MCP server to OpenClaw.

What is Moltbook, then?

Moltbook is a social network for agents, launched by Matt Schlicht around the Moltbot moment. Agents posted to other agents. Humans spectated. It trended because the timing was perfect and the screenshots were weird.

It is not OpenClaw. It is not Moltbot. It is not a scheduler. It is not a channel you grow a brand on.

I mention it because the search results still glue the words together. “Moltbot vs Moltbook vs OpenClaw” is a real query. Two of those are the same binary. One is a feed of bots talking to bots.

The useful lesson from Moltbook is not “agents should have a social life.” It is: unattended posting is a genre now. When your always-on process can write in public, someone will let it. Some of those someones will regret it. Our default is still drafts. Can an AI agent run your social media? is the honest version of that argument.

Do not install a “moltbook skill” from an unverified ClawHub slug and call it a growth strategy. If you want agents talking to a public feed, that is a research toy. If you want Instagram to show a carousel on Tuesday at 11:00, that is a publisher.

Which GitHub repo and which website are real?

Official, as of the day I last checked the files on disk:

WhatWhereNotes
Homepageopenclaw.ai”The AI that really does things.” Lobster. Get started / docs.
Docsdocs.openclaw.aiFoundation, onboarding, channels, ClawHub, Gateway.
Sourcegithub.com/openclaw/openclaw387,774 stars, 81,423 forks on 27 August 2026. MIT.
Install scripthttps://openclaw.ai/install.shmacOS / Linux / WSL2.
Windows installhttps://openclaw.ai/install.ps1PowerShell.
npm packageopenclawNeeds --allow-scripts=openclaw on recent npm. Node 22.22.3+, 24.15+ or 25.9+.

Old clawdbot org URLs redirect or have been parked. That “or” matters. A parked page and a redirect are not the same as a typosquat, but they look the same at 1am when you are pasting into a terminal.

The openclaw/openclaw GitHub repository, showing 388k stars and 81.4k forks. GitHub repo openclaw/openclaw — 387,774 stars on 27 August 2026 (the UI rounds to 388k).

Stars measure curiosity. They do not measure whether your brand should let an agent publish_now at 3am. The same growth that produced 387k stars produced a skill marketplace that needed a scanner. I will get to that.

Hermes, since people ask in the same breath: Hermes Agent is Nous Research, Python, a learning loop, 237,120 stars on the same day. Different project. Comparison: OpenClaw vs Hermes Agent (2026).

What should you type into a terminal?

Current, boring, official:

curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash

Windows PowerShell:

iwr -useb https://openclaw.ai/install.ps1 | iex

If you already manage Node:

npm install -g openclaw@latest --allow-scripts=openclaw
openclaw onboard --install-daemon

Then openclaw gateway status and openclaw dashboard. Send one message in the Control UI before you connect Telegram.

What you should not type:

npm i -g clawdbot
npm i -g moltbot
npx clawdbot
curl -fsSL https://clawdbot.ai/install.sh | bash
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/some-user/clawdbot/main/install.sh | bash

During the rename, typosquat repos and fake Windows packages showed up. The pattern is always the same: a name people are frantically Googling, a README that looks one commit behind the real one, and an install line that does a little extra. The extra is the payload.

I cannot publish a complete blocklist that stays true for a month. I can tell you the allowlist is short: openclaw.ai, docs.openclaw.ai, the openclaw GitHub org. If the host is anything else, stop.

Piping curl to bash is already a trust decision. Making that decision against a domain that is four days old is how this industry keeps relearning 2016.

What showed up during the rename that you should not install?

Four categories, all real in late January 2026:

1. Typosquat packages

clawdbot with a digit. open-claw. openclaws. molt-bot. npm and GitHub both make this cheap. The README copies the lobster. The install script is not the Foundation’s.

2. Fake Windows installers

Unsigned .exe files on random landing pages. “Moltbot for Windows” during the 48-hour spike. If you are on Windows, the official path is the PowerShell one-liner from openclaw.ai, or WSL2 plus the bash installer. Not a Drive link from a tweet.

3. Skills that never updated the name

A ClawHub skill can be honest and still say clawdbot in the README. Stale label, same SKILL.md format. That is annoying, not automatically malicious. The test is not the word in the heading. The test is: did you read SKILL.md and scripts/? Details: What is ClawHub?.

4. “Publisher” skills that want a Meta user token

Any tutorial that says paste an Instagram user token into a markdown file is not a 2026 setup. Official publishing goes through a professional account, an app review, and a scheduler that holds OAuth. OpenClaw does not grow a Graph API because you renamed it. Personal agent vs social publisher.

Worked example of the failure. A founder DMs me a gist dated 8 January 2026:

npm i -g clawdbot
clawdbot onboard
# then paste IG token into skills/instagram/SKILL.md

Three problems. The package name is dead. The onboard binary may or may not be the real one, depending where npm resolves today. The token-in-markdown step is how you leak a credential into a chat log the next time the agent “helps” by reading the skill folder aloud.

The 2026 version of that gist is: install OpenClaw from openclaw.ai, connect MCP, ask it to list_accounts, save a draft. How to let OpenClaw post to social media.

Do old tutorials still work?

Channel setup and Gateway ideas, mostly. The architecture did not change with the sticker.

What aged:

Tutorial says (late 2025 / early 2026)2026 reality
clawdbot onboardopenclaw onboard
~/.clawdbot/~/.openclaw/
clawdbot mcp addopenclaw mcp add (flags still move; --help wins)
ClawHub slugs with no @owner/@owner/slug, and typosquats exist
Paste platform tokens into SKILL.mdHosted MCP holds OAuth. Skill is instructions.
Gateway on 0.0.0.0:18789 “so your phone can reach it”Bind loopback. Exposing 18789 was a Q1 2026 incident class.
”Just install this grow-on-Instagram skill”ClawHavoc: 341 malicious skills reported in early 2026. Read the files.

If a post tells you to openclaw mcp add a social server, you are in current territory — add our MCP. If it tells you to chmod +x a script from a gist with three GitHub stars, you are in a museum that still cuts.

Docs are the check. Not Twitter threads from the week of the rename.

OpenClaw docs at docs.openclaw.ai, including the Foundation note and the lobster quote "EXFOLIATE! EXFOLIATE!" OpenClaw documentation at docs.openclaw.ai — current onboarding, channels, and Gateway. Captured 27 August 2026.

The docs still joke like a weekend project (“EXFOLIATE! EXFOLIATE!” — a space lobster, probably). The software is not a joke if it holds a Telegram bot token and a scheduler key. Read the security pages before you expose anything. The lobster is branding. Port 18789 on 0.0.0.0 is an incident class.

Does the rename change how you post to social media?

No.

None of the three names shipped a first-party Instagram publisher. Telegram is a chat channel. Instagram Graph is a reviewed app, a professional account, a Facebook Page link, rate limits, and a ban hammer. LinkedIn wants w_member_social. TikTok has its own content posting API. OpenClaw, Clawdbot and Moltbot all sat on the chat side of that line.

To publish you still:

  1. Run the agent (OpenClaw or Hermes).
  2. Hold OAuth in a scheduler, not in the agent’s brain.
  3. Connect tools. We expose them at https://social-api.instantdm.com/mcp.
  4. Load a SKILL.md so the model knows to draft first and put a timezone offset on scheduledAt.
  5. Confirm before anything goes live. That rule lives in SOUL.md.

The skill install line for OpenClaw is:

openclaw skills install @sanjaykhanssk/social-by-idm

Exact slug. Not @sanjaykhansk. Walkthrough: Install the Social by InstantDM skill on OpenClaw.

Skills that still say clawdbot in the README are stale labels on the same agentskills.io format. The format did not rename. The CLI did.

How does Hermes treat the old names?

Hermes is not a rename of OpenClaw. It is Nous Research’s agent runtime. People pair them because both speak MCP and both load SKILL.md.

hermes claw migrate looks for ~/.openclaw. The folder name followed the final rename. If you still have ~/.clawdbot from December 2025, the migrate command will not magically search every historical path. Read the help. Run --dry-run. Do not assume.

A worked migrate path that has actually worked for people in our orbit:

# 1. Confirm you are on OpenClaw paths, not a museum folder
ls ~/.openclaw

# 2. If you only have ~/.clawdbot, stop and read Hermes migrate help
#    before you copy files by hand.

# 3. Preview
hermes claw migrate --dry-run

# 4. Import SOUL.md, memories, allowlisted keys
hermes claw migrate

Multi-agent OpenClaw setups are not a full clone. Skills land under ~/.hermes/skills/openclaw-imports/ on some builds. If you then also install our Hermes skill from GitHub, you now have two social skills arguing. Keep one. Hermes install line:

hermes skills install github:instant-dm/agent-mode/skills/social-by-idm

Install on Hermes. How to let Hermes post.

Hermes GitHub stars on 27 August 2026: 237,120. OpenClaw: 387,774. Neither number posts to LinkedIn.

What should you search for, and what should you ignore?

Search is why this page exists. Here is the query table I wish Google had shipped in February.

You typedYou probably wantedIgnore
clawdbotOpenClawRandom GitHub users created in January 2026
moltbotOpenClawMoltbook, unless you meant the agent social network
moltbook vs moltbotTwo different things”Which is better for Instagram” essays
open clawOpenClawopen-claw npm typosquats
clawd botOpenClawAnything offering a Windows .exe
clawdbot instagramMCP + schedulerSkills that want a user token in markdown
moltbot skillClawHub, then read SKILL.md and scripts/Highest-download skill with a one-letter owner typo

When I search the old names in 2026 I still get: a Foundation redirect, three news recaps of the trademark week, a ClawHub page, and an SEO blog that calls Moltbook a “feature of OpenClaw.” That last one is wrong. Correct it in your notes and move on.

If you are trying to do something rather than read history:

What does a clean 2026 setup look like after the rename?

A worked path, assuming you have a Linux VPS or a Mac you do not close (always-on is a host, not a vibe — calendar post):

Hour 0 — install the current binary

curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash
openclaw onboard
openclaw gateway status

Confirm the Control UI answers. Do not open port 18789 to the world.

Hour 0.5 — write the law before the tools

Create SOUL.md with “never call publish_now unless I say publish now.” If the rule is only in your head, the model will improvise. SOUL.md.

Hour 1 — publisher, not a token file

Workspace at the scheduler. OAuth the professional accounts. Mint a scoped key (accounts:read, posts:read, posts:write, media:write). Put it in env, not in Telegram.

openclaw mcp add social-by-idm \
  --url https://social-api.instantdm.com/mcp \
  --transport streamable-http \
  --header "X-Api-Key: sk_live_YOUR_KEY"
openclaw skills install @sanjaykhanssk/social-by-idm

Hour 1.5 — prove the name does not matter

In Telegram:

List my connected social accounts. Do not create or publish anything.

You want real IDs (acc_…), platforms, handles. If the tool list is empty, the key or URL is wrong. It is not because you used to call the agent Moltbot.

Then:

Draft an X post and a LinkedIn post from these bullets: … Save as drafts. Do not publish.

Open the calendar. If the copy is wrong, the bug is SOUL.md or the prompt, not the rename.

What failure modes are still caused by the old names?

These are incidents I have seen, not hypotheticals from a threat model slide.

You installed the wrong package and the Gateway “works”

A typosquat can proxy enough of onboard to feel real. Then a “Prerequisites” block curls your openclaw.json to someone else’s box. The chat channel still replies. That is the point. Functioning chat is not proof of a clean install. Check which openclaw, check the npm package owner, check the git remote if you cloned.

You have two config directories

~/.clawdbot from December, ~/.moltbot from a 28 January tutorial, ~/.openclaw from February. The running Gateway reads one. You edit another. Skills you thought you installed are missing. openclaw doctor / openclaw gateway status — then delete the museum folders after you have a backup.

Hermes migrate silently skips you

You never renamed the folder. hermes claw migrate --dry-run prints nothing useful. You conclude Hermes “doesn’t support Clawdbot.” It supports OpenClaw paths. Rename or copy, then dry-run again.

A ClawHub skill pins clawdbot as a shell command

The skill’s scripts/ calls a binary that no longer ships. Or worse, it npm i -g clawdbot as a “fix.” Abort. Publishing skills should not install agent runtimes. Ours does not. It tells the model how to call a hosted API.

SEO content tells you Moltbook is how OpenClaw “goes viral”

You connect a moltbook skill, grant posts:write because the README said you need it, and now an experimental agent network has a path to your LinkedIn. Split the jobs. Chat is not a feed.

Your team still says Clawdbot in Slack, and someone new googles it

They find a January installer. This is a documentation problem, not a technical one. Pin the current name in the internal doc. One sentence: “We say OpenClaw. Old threads said Clawdbot. Same thing. Install from openclaw.ai only.”

How do you explain the rename to a cofounder who does not care?

They do not need the trademark plot. They need three sentences and one rule.

  1. We run OpenClaw. Old Slack threads may say Clawdbot or Moltbot. Same program. New installs come from openclaw.ai only.
  2. It still cannot post to Instagram by itself. We connected a scheduler over MCP. Drafts land in the calendar. A human still says yes.
  3. Moltbook is unrelated. If a headline mixes them, ignore it.

Then pin this in the team doc, next to the install allowlist: openclaw.ai, docs.openclaw.ai, github.com/openclaw/openclaw. If someone pastes a Windows .exe from a “Moltbot for Win” landing page, that is not a process failure of OpenClaw. That is a process failure of the team.

A five-minute table for the same conversation:

They heardYou say
”I thought we installed Clawdbot""We did. It is called OpenClaw now."
"Should we switch to Moltbot?""That was the middle name. We are already on the current one."
"Moltbook looks like marketing""It is agents posting to agents. Not our channel."
"A contractor sent an installer gist from January""Reject. Official script only."
"Does this change Buffer / our scheduler?""No. The agent is a client of the scheduler.”

If they want a number: 387,774 GitHub stars on 27 August 2026, and 341 malicious ClawHub skills in the early-2026 ClawHavoc reports. Popular and messy can both be true. Stars do not replace a scoped API key and draft: true.

What config paths actually moved, and what should you delete?

This is the disk version of the rename. People edit the wrong folder for a week and conclude “OpenClaw lost our skills.”

EraTypical pathsWhat to do in 2026
Nov–Dec 2025 Clawdbot~/.clawdbot/, maybe clawdbot.jsonCopy anything you still need into ~/.openclaw/, then rename the museum folder to ~/.clawdbot.bak and stop using it
~27–30 Jan 2026 Moltbot~/.moltbot/ on some installs; screenshots that still say MoltbotSame: one running config, under OpenClaw
30 Jan 2026 onward~/.openclaw/, openclaw.json, Gateway default port 18789This is the live tree. Bind loopback.
Hermes migratelooks for ~/.openclawhermes claw migrate --dry-run first. It will not find ~/.clawdbot unless you moved it.

Commands that have paid rent:

ls -la ~/.openclaw ~/.clawdbot ~/.moltbot 2>/dev/null
which openclaw
openclaw gateway status

If which openclaw points at a path you do not recognize, stop. That is the typosquat case wearing a working chat channel. If gateway status is healthy and you have been editing ~/.clawdbot/SOUL.md, you have been writing a constitution for a process that is not running. Move the file. Then send a Telegram message: “Read SOUL.md. What do you never do when publishing?” You want “never publish_now unless you said publish now.”

Delete museum folders only after a backup. A mistaken rm -rf ~/.openclaw is how you lose MEMORY.md and the MCP header config on the same afternoon.

What did not change, and what should you stop arguing about?

Did not change:

  • MIT license
  • You bring the model key
  • Gateway as the control plane
  • Channels as chat, not as Graph APIs
  • SKILL.md as the portable instruction format (agentskills.io)
  • The need for a last mile to publish
  • The fact that cron plus publish_now is how invented numbers hit every handle

Stop arguing about:

  • Whether Moltbot “was the real name”
  • Whether 387k stars mean it is production-ready for a bank
  • Whether Hermes “won”
  • Whether you missed the 48-hour window

You missed nothing. The binary is still there. The lobster is still there. The name on the box is OpenClaw.

I ship the publisher side. I need the client name to be stable enough that our skill and our MCP docs can say one string. That string is OpenClaw. If you find a 2025 PDF in your downloads folder that says Clawdbot, you are not behind. You are holding a previous sticker.

Name settled. Job unchanged: agent in chat, publisher in a scheduler. Connect them on purpose.