Two months ago, Peter Steinberger built a project over the weekend. From the initial WhatsApp Relay to now, gaining over 100,000 GitHub stars and attracted 2 million visitors in a single week.
On January 30th, the project officially announced its new name: OpenClaw.
Three Name Changes
The project went through three names.
When it was born in November 2025, it was called Clawd, a homophone of Claude plus “claw.” That lasted until Anthropic’s legal department suggested reconsidering.
Next came Moltbot, from a 5 AM community Discord brainstorming session. Molting represented transformation—like a lobster shedding its shell to grow. But this name never quite rolled off the tongue.
