- Moltbot is the recently rebranded open-source AI assistant Clawdbot
- Moltbot operates inside messaging apps to perform tasks
- The rebrand followed a trademark warning and triggered a wave of chaos, stolen handles, and fake crypto scams
A promising open-source AI assistant called Clawdbot transformed into a viral sensation before a hasty rebrand to Moltbot over potential trademark concerns led to a deluge of attempted scams and fraud.
After the chatbot surged to tens of thousands of GitHub stars and attracted praise from high-profile AI researchers and investors, Anthropic raised trademark concerns that its name sounded too similar to the company’s chatbot, Claude.
Moltbot’s developer, Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger, chose the new name after hearing from Anthropic. He pulled the trigger in the middle of the night, but that didn’t prevent bots from instantly grabbing abandoned social handles or opportunists from pumping out fake “Clawdbot” crypto tokens. The sleep-deprived Steinberger even accidentally renamed his personal GitHub account instead of the project before fixing the error.
There’s a reason for all the chaos. Moltbot’s central pitch of an AI that an average person can use to organize their digital life has obvious appeal. It’s design is supposed to make it behave more like how people imagined an AI assistant a decade ago, before they were trained to lower their expectations. It exists within the tools you already use and promises to handle tasks you keep putting off.
Moltbot runs locally, with the user choosing an AI model to power it, and it communicates via standard messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, and Slack. It keeps a long‑term record of your preferences, projects, and conversation history. If you say you want to start a diet, it remembers. If you asked it last week to track a habit, it will remind you today. If you juggle multiple projects across apps and services, it can help automate them.
This integration is what sets the tool apart from typical AI chatbots. You can tell Moltbot to summarize your inbox, file documents, organize your notes, generate reports, or nudge you when deadlines approach, and it can interact with third‑party apps.
Moltbot mania
When the project first launched under the name Clawdbot, it seemed like a much easier way to achieve the kind of agentic AI that companies like OpenAI and Google have been discussing. Interest multiplied, and suddenly people were talking about a small open‑source side project as the prototype for a new era of personal automation.
Then came the name change request. And with it, a kind of digital slapstick routine. Within seconds of Steinberger announcing the rebrand, bots pounced on the old name. An unrelated crypto token calling itself $CLAWD appeared almost immediately and soared to a comical market cap before cratering.
Scam accounts claimed to be part of the engineering team. And a widely shared image of a lobster with a human face, created when Steinberger jokingly asked Moltbot to “age up” its mascot, was taken for the real thing by many people for a while.
But people love a scrappy project trying to survive its own sudden fame. They also love a mascot with meme potential. Not that Moltbot is for everyone. Because the AI can, with permission, control parts of your computer and access sensitive personal data, caution is advisable, and you shouldn’t install third‑party plugins without vetting them.
For most non‑technical AI chatbot users, Moltbot is more a harbinger than a tool to use right now. The big tech companies have been publicly chasing the dream of “AI agents” for months. Moltbot is one of the first real examples the public can touch, even if most people won’t deploy it on their own machines. It hints at a future in which digital assistants don’t just answer questions but actively maintain your calendar, prioritize your messages, and coordinate your digital life. The lobster mascot is optional.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
