If you've been on X this week, you've seen Clawdbot everywhere. The open-source AI assistant has exploded from zero to 60,000+ GitHub stars, with Andrej Karpathy and David Sacks both posting about it. One user put it bluntly: "Clawdbot is Jarvis. It already exists."
So what is it? Created by Peter Steinberger (founder of PSPDFKit), Clawdbot is a self-hosted AI agent that runs on your Mac, PC, or server and actually controls your computer. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude's web interfaces, it executes terminal commands, manages files, browses the web, and interacts with apps autonomously while you sleep.
Always-on messaging - Connect via WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, iMessage, or Signal. Message your AI assistant from anywhere, get responses in the same chat.
Persistent memory - Remembers your preferences and past conversations across sessions. No context window resets.
50+ integrations - Gmail, GitHub, Spotify, Obsidian, Notion, Apple Notes. The AI can write and modify its own skills.
Proactive actions - Morning briefings, reminders, alerts when something you care about happens. It reaches out to you.
The hype is real, but so are the caveats. The GitHub repo has 500+ open security issues, and running an AI with full system access requires serious sandboxing. Cost-wise: free and open-source, but Claude API usage runs $20-50/month for moderate use, to $100s a day for heavy usage.
Plot twist: Anthropic just issued a trademark request forcing a rebrand (the name "Clawd" was too similar to "Claude"). It is now Moltbot.
