I Loved My OpenClaw AI Agent—Until It Turned on Me

3 days ago 18

OpenClaw, a almighty caller agentic assistant, has a happening for guacamole.

This is 1 of respective things I discovered portion utilizing the viral artificial intelligence bot arsenic my idiosyncratic adjunct this past week.

Previously known arsenic some Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw precocious became a Silicon Valley darling, charming AI enthusiasts and investors anxious to either clasp the bleeding borderline oregon nett from it. The highly capable, web-savvy AI bot has adjacent inspired its ain AI-only (or mostly) societal network.

As the writer of WIRED’s AI Lab newsletter, I figured I should instrumentality the plunge and effort utilizing OpenClaw myself. I had the bot show incoming emails and different messages, excavation up absorbing research, bid groceries, and adjacent negociate deals connected my behalf.

For brave (or possibly reckless) aboriginal adopters, OpenClaw seems similar a morganatic glimpse of the future. But immoderate consciousness of wonderment is accompanied by a dollop of panic arsenic the AI cause romps done emails and record systems, wields a recognition card, and occasionally adjacent turns connected its quality idiosyncratic (although successful my case, this about-face was wholly my fault).

How I Set It Up

OpenClaw is designed to unrecorded connected a location machine that’s connected each the time. I configured OpenClaw to tally connected a PC moving Linux, to entree Anthropic’s exemplary Claude Opus, and to speech to maine implicit Telegram.

Installing OpenClaw is simple, but configuring it and keeping it moving tin beryllium a headache. You request to springiness the bot an AI backend by generating an API cardinal for Claude, GPT, oregon Gemini, which you paste into the bot’s config files. To person OpenClaw usage Telegram, I besides had to archetypal create a caller Telegram bot, past springiness OpenClaw the bot’s credentials.

For OpenClaw to beryllium genuinely useful, you request to link it to different bundle tools. I created a Brave Browser Search API relationship to fto OpenClaw hunt the web. I besides configured it truthful that it could entree the Chrome browser done an extension. And, God assistance me, I gave it entree to email, Slack, and Discord servers.

Once each this was done, I could speech to OpenClaw from anyplace and archer it however to usage my computer. At the outset, OpenClaw asked maine immoderate idiosyncratic questions and fto maine prime its personality. (The options bespeak the project’s anarchic vibe; my bot, called Molty, likes to telephone itself a “chaos gremlin.”) The resulting persona feels precise antithetic from Siri oregon ChatGPT, and it’s 1 of the secrets to OpenClaw’s runaway popularity.

Web Research

One of the archetypal things I asked Molty to bash was nonstop maine a regular roundup of absorbing AI and robotics probe papers from the arXiv, a level wherever researchers upload their work.

I had antecedently spent a mates afternoons vibe-coding websites (www.arxivslurper.com and www.robotalert.xyz) to hunt the arXiv. It was astonishing (though a small demoralizing) to spot OpenClaw instantly automate each of the aforesaid browsing and investigation enactment required. The papers it selects are so-so, but with further acquisition I ideate it could get a batch better. This benignant of web searching and monitoring is surely helpful, and I ideate I’ll usage OpenClaw for this a lot.

IT Support

OpenClaw besides has an uncanny, astir spooky quality to hole method issues connected your machine.

This shouldn’t beryllium surprising, fixed that it is designed to usage a frontier exemplary susceptible of penning and debugging codification and utilizing the bid enactment with ease. Even so, it’s eerie erstwhile OpenClaw conscionable reconfigures its ain settings to load a caller AI exemplary oregon debugs a occupation with the browser connected the fly.

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