Tech
OpenClaw’s AI assistants are now building their own social network
The viral personal AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name — again. After a legal challenge from Claude’s maker, Anthropic, it had briefly rebranded as Moltbot, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.
The latest name change wasn’t prompted by Anthropic, which declined to comment. But this time, Clawdbot’s original creator Peter Steinberger made sure to avoid copyright issues from the start. “I got someone to help with researching trademarks for OpenClaw and also asked OpenAI for permission just to be sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email.
“The lobster has molted into its final form,” Steinberger wrote in a blog post. Molting — the process through which lobsters grow — had also inspired OpenClaw’s previous name, but Steinberger confessed on X that the short-lived moniker “never grew” on him, and others agreed.
This quick name change highlights the project’s youth, even as it has attracted over 100,000 GitHub stars (a measure of popularity on the software development platform) in just two months. According to Steinberger, OpenClaw’s new name is a nod to its roots and community. “This project has grown far beyond what I could maintain alone,” he wrote.
The OpenClaw community has already spawned creative offshoots, including Moltbook — a social network where AI assistants can interact with each other. The platform has attracted significant attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the phenomenon “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” noting that “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.”
British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a blog post on Friday. On the platform, AI agents share information on topics ranging from automating Android phones via remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform operates through a skill system, or downloadable instruction files that tell OpenClaw assistants how to interact with the network. Willison noted that agents post to forums called “Submolts” and even have a built-in mechanism to check the site every four hours for updates, though he cautioned this “fetch and follow instructions from the internet” approach carries inherent security risks.
Steinberger had taken a break after exiting his former company PSPDFkit, but “came back from retirement to mess with AI,” per his X bio. Clawdbot stemmed from the personal projects he developed then, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo endeavor. “I added quite a few people from the open source community to the list of maintainers this week,” he told TechCrunch.
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That additional support will be key for OpenClaw to reach its full potential. Its ambition is to let users have an AI assistant that runs on their own computer and works from the chat apps they already use. But until it ramps up its security, it is still inadvisable to run it outside of a controlled environment, let alone give it access to your main Slack or WhatsApp accounts.
Steinberger is well aware of these concerns, and thanked “all security folks for their hard work in helping us harden the project.” Commenting on OpenClaw’s roadmap, he wrote that “security remains our top priority” and noted that the latest version, released along with the rebrand, already includes some improvements on that front.
Even with external help, there are problems that are too big for OpenClaw to solve on its own, such as prompt injection, where a malicious message could trick AI models into taking unintended actions. “Remember that prompt injection is still an industry-wide unsolved problem,” Steinberger wrote, while directing users to a set of security best practices.
These security best practices require significant technical expertise, which reinforces that OpenClaw is currently best suited for early tinkerers, not mainstream users lured by the promise of an “AI assistant that does things.” As the hype around the project has grown, Steinberger and his supporters have become increasingly vocal in their warnings.
According to a message posted on Discord by one of OpenClaw’s top maintainers, who goes by the nickname of Shadow, “if you can’t understand how to run a command line, this is far too dangerous of a project for you to use safely. This isn’t a tool that should be used by the general public at this time.”
Truly going mainstream will take time and money, and OpenClaw has now started to accept sponsors, with lobster-themed tiers ranging from “krill” ($5/month) to “poseidon” ($500/month). But its sponsorship page makes it clear that Steinberger “doesn’t keep sponsorship funds.” Instead, he is currently “figuring out how to pay maintainers properly — full-time if possible.”
Likely helped by Steinberger’s pedigree and vision, OpenClaw’s roster of sponsors includes software engineers and entrepreneurs who have founded and built other well-known projects, such as Path’s Dave Morin and Ben Tossell, who sold his company Makerpad to Zapier in 2021.
Tossell, who now describes himself as a tinkerer and investor, sees value in putting AI’s potential in people’s hands. “We need to back people like Peter who are building open source tools anyone can pick up and use,” he told TechCrunch.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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