OpenClaw, formerly known as Moltbot and Clawdbot, is an agentic AI assistant that has surged in popularity with the tech-savvy first adopter crowd in recent months. According to some of these early users, OpenClaw is the first tool to live up to the promise of agent AIs.
I’ve recently tried some AI agent tools and haven’t been particularly impressed, but was intrigued enough by OpenClaw, which is open source and free, to give it a whirl and see how it stacked up. Ultimately, I found the process of using it to be a bit more complex than the AI agent tools I’ve tried.
One of the selling points of OpenClaw is that it operates on your computer, which is supposed to alleviate some privacy concerns and give you more control. But that also comes with its own inherent security risks, and makes setting up the tool more complicated and above my technical know-how. As a result, I used a browser-based version of OpenClaw.
True techies will be dismayed by this as it defeats the purpose of the tool in the first place, but even in this more limited version, I found it outperformed other AI agents I’ve used, including Google’s new Auto Browse, and could indeed help with my research and class prep.
What is OpenClaw?
OpenClaw is the one true AI agent that will rule all the other pretenders, or at least that’s the impression some of its earliest adopters give. The initial version is free and open source, and designed to integrate with your digital life, acting as a true digital assistant.
Launched in November 2025 by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian coder, he named it Clawd as a playful nod to the popular AI chatbot Claude. However, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, asked Steinberger to change the name. He briefly changed it to Moltbot, inspired by the “molting” process in which lobsters shed and regrow their shells, before settling on OpenClaw.
This AI agent gives users the ability to do tasks such as order groceries or monitor and summarize emails. For a teacher, it might help with lesson planning and class management, and if it could be made fully secure, could even be used for activities such as monitoring class participation and trends, though that would require many more safeguards around student data.
OpenClaw is designed to run on a computer that you own. If you leave on your device, you can then communicate with your AI assistant via various messenger apps and have it perform tasks for you regardless of where you are.
All these features do come with some inherent risks. Giving a tool that can behave in unexpected ways complete access to your computer can be dangerous, and there's something equally insecure right now about having an AI communicate with others or use your credit card to purchase things.
What Does It Cost?
The standard version of OpenClaw is free and open source. It does require some degree of technical know-how to get set up, and takes a little time even for those with this know how.
Tools are emerging that allow you to access the tool on a virtual browser. This makes using it easier, but arguably defeats some of the purpose. Additionally, in my experience, some of these sites seemed suspect.
I won’t link to the OpenClaw site, which I ended up using, because I felt that its design intentionally mimicked OpenClaw’s web design so you would think the two companies were linked—they are not. This makes me worried about paying for their services personally, and even more worried about directing readers there.
How Good Is OpenClaw At Its Job?
By not operating OpenClaw on my device, I couldn’t access some of its best features, but still was fairly impressed overall. OpenClaw was able to do things such as look up Airbnb options for an academic conference I’m going to, and actually did a great job of summarizing the strengths of each listing, unlike some other AI agents that had failed in this task.
It was also able to find and summarize various lesson plans on teaching writing, and was as skilled at research as any AI tool I’ve found. It could quickly find, summarize, and categorize research on AI tutors, quantum mechanics, and more.
I was left with the strong impression that I could get more with this tool, with more thought and perhaps a version more customized to my use and to teaching.
Bottom Line On OpenClaw
OpenClaw is not essential, but it’s a strong-performing AI agent and one that tech-savvy teachers will want to explore with caution from their personal, non-school issued devices. Nothing I was able to do with it was any kind of game-changer, but if you’re looking for an AI agent to experiment with and see how it might help you and your teaching practice, this one is worth adding to your list of tools to check out.
For those of us who are less tech-savvy, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on these types of tools as they’re likely to continue to improve and get more user-friendly and integrated into teaching as they do.
