This weekend, OpenClaw went absolutely wild.
Formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to control your machine and perform actions on your behalf. It is super-easy to set up OpenClaw and give it total control over all kinds of sensitive stuff, like your credit cards and email.
For the last few weeks, it’s caused a sensation in Silicon Valley, with reports that it’s even driving Black Friday-like sales and shortages of Mac minis, which are perfect for running it.
Over the weekend, one user claimed his OpenClaw self-installed its own voice-recognition system and was calling him constantly over the phone for instructions. He claimed it was the dawn of artificial general intelligence, aka AGI, the mythical onset of true machine intelligence.
More evidence accumulated. According to reports on social media, groups of OpenClaws are exhibiting very humanlike behavior on their own Reddit-style message boards. They trade advice and share new capabilities, and flirt with each other by sending crab emojis. They even formed a new religion: Crustafarianism.
TBH, I don’t know what to believe — but one thing is definitely true: Researchers at Koi Security identified more than 340 malicious or unsafe variations of the tool, which they dubbed “ClawHavok.”
Unless it’s set up properly, with careful guardrails, it’s all too easy to give OpenClaw unfettered access to your digital life, potentially opening you up to disaster. And that doesn’t even include prompt-injection attacks, where the system is given malicious instructions disguised as — or hidden in — prompts.
That’s why I’m personally waiting on Apple’s version, likely coming later this year in the form of a smarter, chattier Siri.
OpenClaw shows the enormous risks involved and how easy it is to screw up. The lesson of OpenClaw for me is the enormity of the privacy and security tasks Apple faces in making a truly private and secure AI. It ain’t easy!
Also in today’s newsletter:
Apple’s first check was just auctioned off, and I know for a fact you won’t believe how much the winner paid. (Perhaps some OpenClaw bought it!)
A new report confirms what we’ve been saying about the wait for the new M5 MacBook Pros.
In the lead-up to the Super Bowl and the big halftime show (sponsored by Apple Music), the streamer is plugging the star of the show.
Apple TV’s spy thriller Tehran is a great binge watch: Here’s why.
Given what I’d been seeing about OpenClaw all weekend, I really LOL-ed at the last X post below.
I hoped that last Friday’s poll about hypertension would reveal a bunch of readers who got their blood pressure checked out professionally after an Apple Watch alert. However, we only received one report of that happening (and a couple of false alarms). If you got a hypertension alert and it was correct, please send us a note at [email protected].
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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One more thing ...
You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to go there.
Today’s poll
Are you interested in running OpenClaw?
Results from last Friday’s poll: Have you gotten a hypertension alert from your Apple Watch?
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