In early 2026, the AI landscape shifted dramatically with the rapid rise of OpenClaw , an open-source, self-hosted autonomous AI agent that moved beyond passive chat to genuine action-taking capabilities. Originally launched in November 2025 as Clawdbot by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger (founder of PSPDFKit and known on X as @steipete), the project faced a trademark challenge from Anthropic over its similarity to "Claude." It briefly became Moltbot before settling on
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