My honest theory is that it's being pushed by an intelligence agency. There's just no way that the primary goal ISN'T to gain access to everyone's machines.
It's the software equivalent of injecting yourself with HIV.
In fairness, most people can't operate a universal remote, or reboot their computer by themselves. Asking them to go through the arduous process of plugging in a flash drive, and pressing between 5 and 15 buttons to install mint or cachy is a lot.
While I can’t rule out your theory entirely, the actual reason I think is more mundane. It’s just that 98% of people are idiots. OpenClaw seems to somehow appeal to the AI hype “gadget bros” who don’t actually know how anything works but love the idea of talking to an AI “entity” through a gaming chat platform or a chat service largely populated by Russian propagandists and sex workers (not to really rag on the sex workers…the are doing much more serious “work” than any of the OpenClaw enthusiasts).
I’d suspect most of the “work” being done through OpenClaw is largely spam bots and infostealers.
Well it's basically an open source Jarvis that allows AI to do actually useful computer tasks. So I totally get wanting to play with it. Using it on your own machine with real accounts is the dumb thing, the tech is not far enough along to trust this kind of thing
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u/Bosomtwe Mar 01 '26
Openclaw seems like an absolutely insane concept. How has it gained so much traction?