Clawdbot Rebrands Again: New Identity "OpenClaw" Announced with Support for Kimi K2.5 and Xiaomi MiMo

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Two months ago, Peter Steinberger built a project over a single weekend. What started as a simple WhatsApp Relay has now exploded into a phenomenon with over 100,000 GitHub stars and 2 million weekly visitors.

On January 30, the project officially announced its final name: OpenClaw.

Three Names, One Evolution

The project has undergone a series of identity shifts to reach this milestone:

Clawd (November 2025): Born as a play on "Claude" combined with "Claw." This was short-lived following a request from Anthropic’s legal department.
Moltbot: Conceived during a 5 AM Discord brainstorming session. "Molting" symbolized growth and transformation (like a lobster shedding its shell). However, the community found it difficult to pronounce and remember.
OpenClaw (Final): The team has done their homework this time—trademark searches are cleared, the domain is purchased, and migration code is ready. The name reflects the project's core: Open for open-source and community-driven, and Claw to honor its lobster heritage.

What is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant platform that runs locally on the user's hardware and integrates with existing chat applications. By supporting WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, the AI assistant follows the user wherever they are already communicating.

Core Philosophy: Your Assistant, Your Machine, Your Rules.

Unlike SaaS-based AI assistants, your data never touches a third-party server. OpenClaw runs where you choose—be it a laptop, a home server, or a VPS. Your infrastructure, your keys, your data.

Major Updates in the Rebrand Release

Along with the new brand identity, OpenClaw has launched several significant features:

New Channels: Support for Twitch and Google Chat plugins.
Expanded Model Support: Official integration for Kimi K2.5 and Xiaomi MiMo-V2-Flash.
Enhanced Web Chat: Users can now send images via the web interface just like in messaging apps.
Hardened Security: This release includes 34 security-focused commits. The team also released a machine-verifiable security model. While "prompt injection" remains a challenge for the entire AI industry, the team advocates for using strong models and following security best practices.

The Road Ahead

Security remains the number one priority. The team is currently focused on Gateway reliability, increasing feature depth, and supporting even more models and providers.

The project’s scale has officially surpassed what a single person can maintain. Peter Steinberger has spent the last few days onboarding new maintainers and establishing processes to handle the influx of Pull Requests and Issues. He is also exploring sustainable ways to compensate maintainers, ideally as full-time roles.

The lobster has completed its final molt. While the name has changed, the mascot remains the resilient lobster.