What is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw is a free, open-source personal AI agent that runs on your own machine and connects large language models directly to your files, shell, browser, and messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and Discord.

Unlike a typical chatbot that only answers questions in a request-response loop, OpenClaw is built to run continuously: it can execute multi-step workflows, call tools in sequence, evaluate the results, and decide what to do next without checking in with a person at every step.

• Self-hosted, so it runs on hardware you control rather than a vendor's cloud
• Model-agnostic, supporting Claude, GPT models, and local models via Ollama
• Extended through a plugin system called Skills, which can be installed from a public registry called ClawHub

Because it has direct system access, OpenClaw can take real actions like reading and writing files, running shell commands, and browsing the web, which is exactly what makes it powerful and also what makes its security model worth understanding closely.