Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw

If you installed Clawdbot, you installed OpenClaw. The project began as Warelay, a WhatsApp gateway, became Clawd living in a Clawdbot, and in January 2026 received a polite trademark email from Anthropic asking for a new name. The community voted for Moltbot, because molting is what lobsters do to grow, and three days later the team renamed again to the name that stuck. The docs keep the whole story on a lore page; here is the practical version.

The dates

• Clawd in Clawdbot: November 25, 2025 to January 27, 2026.
• January 27, 2026: the email arrives at 5am, the name is called by 6:14am, and the community picks Moltbot from hundreds of proposals.
• January 30, 2026: the final rename to OpenClaw. In three hours the GitHub organisation, the X handle, the npm packages and the docs domain all moved, and the announcement drew two hundred thousand views in ninety minutes.
• The name is a definition: open source, open to everyone, and the lobster heritage it came from.

The rename was chaotic in the way the docs describe with some relish. Bots sniped the old social handles within seconds and posted crypto wallets. A personal GitHub account was renamed by accident in the panic and squatted within minutes. Scammers launched a token using artwork stolen twenty minutes earlier, and fake profiles claimed to be the project’s head of engineering. If you find an OpenClaw token or an official-looking developer selling something, that is what you found.

New shell, same lobster soul. Third time’s the charm.

What did not change

• The runtime, the Gateway, the workspace and the memory files: the lobster molted, the software kept working.
• Skills written for the old name: a legacy metadata block is still accepted when the new one is absent, so old installed skills keep their dependency gates.
• The community, now called the Moltiverse in the docs, and the license.

What an old install still needs

• Environment variables: OpenClaw reads only the new prefix. Old prefixed variables are silently ignored, and a single deprecation warning at Gateway startup lists the ones it found. Rename each by swapping the prefix.
• The service unit on Linux: a pre-rename gateway service may still exist on machines upgraded from very old installs, and the uninstall commands detect it.
• Everything with the old name in a URL: the docs, the packages and the registry moved, so bookmarks and scripts that still point at the old names are the first thing to update.

Upgrading itself is the usual update path, and the doctor command with its fix flag is how retired settings get migrated after a version jump. Updating OpenClaw is the guide for doing that without breaking what worked yesterday.

If you are arriving from the old name

Nothing about the product changed with the name, and everything about the ecosystem did: the registry, the hosts, the scams. What is OpenClaw is the explainer for what OpenClaw is today, and Hosted OpenClaw on Diali is the same runtime hosted, with the update path handled for you.

• Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw: same project, three names, one week.
• Swap the environment prefix, check the old service unit, update your bookmarks.
• Anything selling a token or a title is not the project.