What Is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw is an open-source, self-hosted AI assistant designed to work like a full-time executive assistant — triaging email, managing calendars, drafting replies, sending messages, and automating workflows across your tools. It runs entirely on your own hardware, which means your data never leaves your network.

Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which are chat interfaces you go to when you have a question, OpenClaw is an always-on agent that works in the background. It reads your inbox, watches your calendar, and takes action proactively — before you ask it to.

Where it came from

OpenClaw was created by Peter Steinberger, the founder of PSPDFKit (now part of Nutrient), a developer tools company he scaled to $100M+ ARR and 250+ employees. After selling PSPDFKit, Steinberger started building a personal AI assistant for himself and eventually open-sourced it.

The project has gone through several names — originally Clawdbot, briefly Moltbot, and now OpenClaw. The repo has accumulated over 150,000 stars on GitHub, making it one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in recent history.

What it actually does

OpenClaw isn't a chatbot. It's an agent that connects to your real tools and takes real actions:

• Email triage: Reads incoming email, labels and prioritizes messages, drafts replies, and can send on your behalf with approval.
• Calendar management: Schedules meetings, resolves conflicts, proposes times to external contacts, and blocks focus time.
• Proactive briefings: Sends you a morning briefing with your agenda, flagged emails, and anything that needs attention.
• Messaging integration: Works with Slack, iMessage, WhatsApp, and other messaging platforms to monitor and respond to messages.
• Custom workflows: Automates recurring tasks — expense report reminders, weekly summaries, follow-up nudges, document preparation, and more.

How it works under the hood

OpenClaw's architecture has a few key components:

• Gateway server: The central process that manages connections to your email, calendar, and messaging services. It handles authentication and keeps everything in sync.
• Agent runner: The execution engine that processes incoming events, decides what actions to take, and executes them. This is where the LLM (typically Claude) does its reasoning.
• Skills: Modular capabilities that define what the agent can do — each skill is a self-contained unit (e.g., “schedule meeting,” “draft reply,” “summarize thread”).
• Memory system: A persistent knowledge base that stores context about your preferences, contacts, and past interactions. This is what makes the assistant get better over time.

Everything runs locally. The only external calls are to the LLM API (Anthropic's Claude) for reasoning, and to the services you connect (Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, etc.).

What you need to run it

OpenClaw is designed to run on a dedicated machine in your home or office. The recommended setup:

• Hardware: Mac Mini M4 Pro (recommended). Runs 24/7 with minimal power draw. You can also use any Mac with Apple Silicon, or a Linux machine.
• API keys: An Anthropic API key for Claude. OpenClaw uses Claude as its reasoning engine. Typical API costs range from $50–$200/month depending on usage volume.
• Network: A stable internet connection. The machine needs to stay online to process events in real time.
• Service accounts: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 credentials for email and calendar. Slack workspace access if you want messaging integration.

How it's different from ChatGPT or Claude

The comparison people usually reach for is “it's like ChatGPT but for email.” That undersells it. Here are the real differences:

• Self-hosted: Your data stays on your hardware. No emails or calendar events are stored on someone else's cloud.
• Persistent memory: ChatGPT forgets you between sessions. OpenClaw remembers your preferences, your contacts, how you like replies worded, and what you care about.
• Proactive: You don't open an app and type a prompt. OpenClaw is always running, watching for events, and taking action before you ask.
• Always-on: It processes email and messages 24/7. A reply can be drafted at 3 AM and waiting for your approval when you wake up.
• Connected: It's wired directly into your email, calendar, and messaging tools. It doesn't need you to copy-paste context.

Security considerations

Running an AI agent with access to your email and calendar is inherently sensitive. This isn't a risk-free tool. A research team at Cisco found that AI coding agents (including open-source ones) can be susceptible to prompt injection attacks through malicious content in emails or documents.

OpenClaw includes a hardening guide in its documentation, but it's up to the operator to implement it correctly. Key security measures include:

• Enabling audit trails so you can review every action the agent takes.
• Configuring access controls to limit what the agent can do without human approval.
• Setting up network isolation so the agent can't reach systems it doesn't need.
• Regular updates to stay current with security patches from the project.

This is one of the main reasons teams hire professional help for deployment — getting the security configuration right matters more than getting it running.

Press and community

OpenClaw has received significant attention since its release:

• 150,000+ GitHub stars, making it one of the most-starred open-source projects on the platform.
• Featured in MacStories, Fast Company, CNBC, and covered by IBM's research team.
• Andrej Karpathy (former Tesla AI director, OpenAI founding member) called it “the most impressive open-source AI agent project.”

“Most AI products are toys. This one does real work.”

The community is active on GitHub and Discord, with regular releases and a growing ecosystem of third-party skills and integrations.

Who it's for

OpenClaw is most useful for people who spend significant time on email and scheduling — founders, executives, chiefs of staff, and operational leaders at companies with 4–50 employees. If you're processing 100+ emails a day and managing a complex calendar, it can meaningfully reduce the time you spend on administrative work.

It's not for everyone. You need to be comfortable with an AI reading your email. You need dedicated hardware. And the setup is non-trivial — it's not a download-and-double-click experience.