OpenClaw

Few projects have grown like OpenClaw, the self-hosted personal AI assistant that began life as Clawdbot, was briefly Moltbot after an Anthropic trademark notice, and settled on its current name in January 2026; it has since become the most-starred software project on GitHub, past 380,000 stars, and is stewarded by the nonprofit OpenClaw Foundation. The MIT-licensed system runs a local gateway control plane on hardware the owner controls, managing sessions, tools, and channel connections, and bridges an AI agent into WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Signal, Google Chat, and iMessage so it can read email, manage calendars, and chain actions across more than 50 tool integrations. It works with hosted model providers or fully local models, and companion apps add voice, canvas, and camera features. Installer scripts cover macOS, Linux, and Windows, or it installs from npm on Node.js 22 or newer. Because the agent holds real credentials and acts unattended, it is aimed at technical users comfortable operating and securing their own gateway.