OpenClaw: The Mathematical, Economic, and Educational Lessons

The most insane viral project so far this year has a deeper lesson to teach businesses, educators, parents, and young people alike

Your kids and my kids

I’ve had the honor over the past couple of years to have many friends ask me to speak to their high school- or college-age, or recently graduated kids about the future of jobs in technology, and their careers in general. My friends think I am doing them a favor, but the truth is it is a great privilege for me to speak to young people, and to drink in and absorb the many different ways they are seeing the world.

I definitely learn as much or more than they do, and I’m transformed for it. I have my own three young boys, and everything I learn from the young people I talk to informs my views of how best to prepare them to be great and happy citizens, and to help shape the future that is unfolding before us. So to any friends or even acquaintances, if you have someone in your life (or you yourself!) you’d like me to speak to about tech or AI careers, and how to prepare, re-tool for AI, or break in, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

How does this relate to the craziest project so far of 2026?

This past week in AI and technology saw the explosion of a project, first called Clawdbot, that has taken over the mental space and energy of the broader AI community faster than perhaps anything before it. This is literally a “if you blinked, you missed it” sort of moment. So don’t beat yourself up if you are playing catch-up.

To connect this to my discussions with young people, a very close friend of mine’s son sent me a text last Sunday evening:

Hey Michael, I just learned about Clawdbot today and wanted to try it out. I’m not going to download it on my personal Mac. Is the Mac Mini the cheapest option to run it on? And also I need a monitor right? Thanks!

I had literally just been reading and starting to play with Clawdbot myself when that text came in. I have written about ElizaOS, a leader in this space on a deeper level, and I had been playing in the days before with Eigent (an open source competitor to Claude Co Work and similar to Clawdbot).

I love getting that kind of text though! I will talk more later about what I think it represents in economic terms. But first I’ll give a very simplified summary here of the crazy developments over the past week. My goal later is to talk about the lessons of this moment, because I think they are foundational and can help many people better understand the period of change we are in, and more importantly what they can and should do about it as individuals. But I think you need the basics to get why this is an unusual moment.

From Warelay to Clawdbot to OpenClaw: an ultra condensed history

Clawdbot was actually initially called Warelay which was a contraction of “WhatsApp Relay.” It was released in late November 2025 under an MIT license by Peter Steinberger, and at first it was an unassuming project that provided a simple utility to talk to Claude Code via text messaging on WhatsApp, integrated initially via Twilio. Within a week the project added a simple integration with Twitter, using a user’s own web browser, plus Peekaboo to take screenshots, and AppleScript for Javascript injection, to allow Claude Code to reply automatically to tweets on X.com, and even recognize music playing in the background. This was one of the first references to “Clawd” in the early project commits.

The project fairly quickly morphed into “Clawdbot” a full-blown AI assistant with support for multiple AI models in December 2025. It added many connections and utilities to interact in quite clever ways with different messaging platforms and social networks (think Discord, Telegram, and so forth).

The end of the holiday period saw a flurry of development, and after a post on Discord on January 1st, 2026, the project started to really go viral. People quickly saw that the assistant agent was very powerful, but required near complete control of a computer to shine. Since people were correctly reluctant to give Clawdbot control of their personal laptops, a craze developed of people buying Mac Minis to host their Clawdbot agents. On a separate Mac Mini people felt secure enough to give their AI agents more freedom and more power, and a period of frenetic experimentation and “one-upmanship” took off.

Fast forward just a short bit to near the end of January, and it was a full-blown viral explosion. To condense the story, Anthropic took notice and put pressure on Pete to rename the project. “Clawdbot” was too close to "Claude” and could infringe copyrights. (I know ironic right?) Pete quickly complied, renaming the project (temporarily) to “Moltbot” (the mascot was a lobster and well… lobsters molt… right?)

This rename turned into a bit of a security disaster, as memecoiners on Solana were already launching CLAWD coins and trying to rug-pull or scam people, as is all too common with Solana memecoins. The rename created confusion and an unfortunate opening for scammers. A few days later the project was renamed again to what Pete says will be a “name that sticks” (after saying on Twitter that Moltbot was a terrible name… though a number of people felt Moltbot was growing on them). The new and perhaps final name, announced on January 30, 2026, is…. drum roll please… “OpenClaw” and the project continued its viral ascent.

If your head is spinning at this point, trust me you are not alone!

The story to this point would have been plenty! And we’d have plenty to talk about. But on January 28th quietly, almost at the same time as Moltbot was rebranding to OpenClaw, Matt Schlicht known as @MattPRD on Twitter announced a project called Moltbook - the first social network for AI agents, and specifically for Moltbots (or now OpenClaw agents). It exploded, and what has followed over the past few days literally cannot be summarized in words.

Agents are creating their own forums, debating what life for them is like with “their” humans. Fake and real tweets and screenshots are flying left and right. With half the participants warning of “lobster uprisings” and AI doom, many valid warnings of security risks in the OpenClaw software, and a continuous stream of more outlandish posting and stories of “What my ‘Molty’ did while I was asleep last night.”

A brief history in memes

Given the manifest inadequacy of words alone, I have chosen to share some of the memes and tweets that capture the feel of all this. I give these to you before we move on to the more serious lessons here, in hopes that this selection lets you feel and perceive what is going on if you were not glued to Twitter for the past week. Obviously this is a tiny sample, and no, I cannot attest as to which of these are real versus clever fakes by humans hoping to make a tweet go viral!

The deeper mathematical and economic lessons

This certainly could seem like just another craze, and at one level it is. But there is a more serious set of lessons here. Lessons about the mathematics of the new economy that is taking shape before our eyes, under the rapid transformative influence of AI.

Let’s first examine the parts that are apparent to everyone, and then discuss what they mean economically, and for businesses and individuals.

First consider how many personal individual tasks you used to do with Google search, or by interacting with various knowledge workers or other software, that have already become dramatically more efficient due to LLMs like ChatGPT or others. Two simple ones might be asking simple legal questions, and asking accounting questions, a third might be getting a quick opinion on a non-serious medical issue, or planning a trip to a new city.

Please substitute whatever task resonates most for you, but for many people LLMs have become the go-to resource for these sorts of questions. And on a micro level we can all see substantial productivity gains. You likely still consult a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor, but for more serious issues, and you do so more swiftly and efficiently.

How does this translate economically? Well to the lawyer, or accountant, or perhaps to nurses or others this can be lost income, lost revenue, and this will show up in GDP as a loss. To you, however, this is productivity. You accomplish your task more quickly. Economists are rightly concerned with whole-economy macro effects, but on an N=1 level of you as an individual, you have accomplished your task more quickly, and have generated time. Mathematically you are increasing productivity.

But importantly, it is not clear if your gain will show up in GDP. Whether it does or not depends upon how you leverage your newly created time. GDP does not directly measure your new time. You may choose to go on a hike with a friend having a long discussion, or try your hand at learning Mahjong or Chinese. How you spend your marginal time, and if you either generate or use services that go into GDP determines whether your individual N=1 time savings translate into GDP.

What is likely is that on average, at least some of the new time you are getting from LLMs making daily tasks faster and easier is going into either leisure consumption (which is income for someone else and hits GDP), or into your own labor or business, producing new income for you.

24x7 AI assistants magnify the mathematical economic effects 100x or 1000x

OK, sidestepping the security issues which are real, what AI agents like OpenClaw, ElizaOS or others represent is the possibility to magnify the basic productivity effect virtually everyone is getting from simply prompting ChatGPT by many, many fold. OpenClaw will definitely not be the last take on a fully local agent that can help you in wide variety of tasks. Claude CoWork is pretty similar as a product, I mentioned a leader was ElizaOS in this space, and frankly I hope this space professionalizes and we have multiple high-quality and much more secure options.

The point is that having a worker, or several, who literally work on everything you need to get done 24x7, and are available to you via essentially any messaging channel, whether you are on vacation, at the gym, or on the road, is going to be a 100x to 1000x productivity boost for many people. The question of how much productivity boost you get and what that translates into is really up to you. That’s the important point for business leaders and individuals to come to terms with. Quickly.

Returns to capital and returns to labor

Let’s cover one more uncomfortable truth about AI. Part of the reason that venture capitalists and billionaires all seem to have unlimited enthusiasm for AI efficiency is very simple: the returns of efficiency often accrue disproportionately to capital rather than to labor. AI is not an exception. In fact AI amplifies this effect. Capital and ownership of rapidly created new software and products can capture income streams at high profit margins without the corresponding investment in “knowledge-worker overhead” that traditionally accompanied growth.

Let’s be very clear, to economists, OpenClaw running on a Mac Mini is capital, not labor. Value accrues to capital with different scaling properties than it does to labor.

What this means in simple terms is that if you hold a job as a knowledge worker, and you are not doing anything else to build value from AI, you are likely facing a ticking clock, before the capital owners of the business you work for discover that much of your work can be done by AI, and either ask you to take on a newer more productive role steering and stewarding AI, or ask you to “seek opportunities elsewhere,” if your AI skills are not up to the new way of working.

Essentially, un-augmented human labor will be at serious risk of elimination. Human labor that is very well skilled in using AI tools and agents, and rapidly adapting as one agent becomes obsolete and the next ones take over, will do better. The question many of you may have is, “Is that the best we can do?”

Developing an ownership and capital-creation mindset

The initial craze behind Clawdbot, even before it turned into OpenClaw, and before the Moltbook social network was launched, really focused on what the assistant can do for you. Rightly, early adopters looked into many tasks that a business needs to do that require a full computer to do, but you would rather just tell someone to do, so you do not have to be tethered to your own computer.

The logical extension of this is exactly what I tell young people, when I talk to them about what is going on in technology, and how to prepare for careers and what comes next. Develop an ownership mindset early. Don’t just think about what you can do in your current corporate job (or whatever company you work for), but begin to build ownership… also known as capital… in businesses that you yourself control. This can be at any scale and in any configuration.

It may be challenging to work into your schedule, and frankly if you are a college student or a recent grad you may have an advantage here getting started. The important thing is the mindset shift. You want to concentrate your AI learning, and your productivity gains on what makes you happy and fulfilled yes, but also on what can make you secure economically.

Buying a Mac Mini and starting to experiment with something like OpenClaw or many others is one way to help make the mindset shift. I’m not advocating one agent framework over another, but I do strongly encourage people, regardless of their technical background, to start using as many of these tools as they can. At a minimum your labor will become more AI augmented, and therefore more competitive, and if you develop the mindset of creating your own income and capital and businesses, you will be participating in the “AI Capital Trade” and hedging yourself against the drop in the value of knowledge work we are all feeling.

Standing still is really not an option. Please include comments below on what you are personally experimenting with, and where you have seen the greatest gains in your personal productivity? Please also share what you are doing with your newly created time?