Clawdbot is now Moltbot for reasons that should be obvious (updated)

Updated Friday, January 30 at 3:40 p.m. ET — When Clawdbot founder Peter Steinberger changed his name to Moltbot, we predicted it wouldn’t be long before he changed it again to something a little more appealing. And on Friday, that’s exactly what happened. Moltbot, the AI ​​personal assistant formerly known as Clawdbot, is now called OpenClaw.

Keep scrolling to read our original story on the name change.

Clawdbot has had quite a journey. The free and open source AI assistant has gone viral on platforms like X, where early adopters, AI superusers and even minor internet celebrities have sung its praises. The Clawdbot GitHub page was even briefly taken over by crypto fraudsters, its creator said on X. Today, the tool has been so successful that it was forced to change its name to Moltbot.

That’s right, now Clawdbot is now Moltbot.

We have to say, this is a change we’ve seen from miles away. A lot Robot Claw Moltbot users rely on Claude, the family of large language models developed by Anthropic, to power the AI ​​assistant. And in an article on X and a new “lore” post on GitHub, Moltbot creator Peter Steinberger confirmed that he decided to change the name under what he described as “polite” pressure from Anthropic.

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Previously, Clawdbot’s mascot was a “space lobster” named Clawd. In the future, the name of the crustacean will be Molty. (Lobsters, it is known, have claws. Do you understand?)

Molty’s new biography reads:

For a time, the lobster was called Clawliving in a Robot Claw. But in January 2026, Anthropic sent a polite email requesting a name change (branding stuff). And so the lobster did what lobsters do best: He molted. Shedding its old shell, the creature reappeared as Moleliving in a Muting robot. New shell, same lobster soul.

Steinberger’s GitHub has already been renamed to reflect the name change, and the old clawd.bot website is being replaced by molt.bot.

To be honest, Moltbot is not such a strong name. Muer is not a particularly attractive verb. It would be like naming your business after a molt, an itch, or a nose job.

And speaking of legal challenges: is it just us, or does the Moltbot mascot look a little too much like the Android mascot?

Credit: Android/Google

Credit: Moltbot/Clawdbot