Nous Research

Chinese citizens went nuts for the technology, leading to articles like this one from CNBC in March, "How China Is Getting Everyone on OpenClaw, From Gearheads to Grandmas." Now, since that initial moment of experimentation, that agentic big bang, if you will, the energy that was initially captured by OpenClaw has found its way into a lot of different places.

After its founder, Peter Steinberger, was absorbed into OpenAI, some folks turned their attention to competing open harnesses like Hermes from News Research.

And of course, as we've seen lately with things like GrokBot, a lot of these features have also slowly made their way into tools that don't have as much technical complexity as the original OpenClaw did.

OpenClaw itself was converted into a nonprofit foundation, and for a while, saw a blistering pace of development, pushing updates every few days.

Luckily, I have a lot of patience, but I can't imagine most normies do." It seemed like the issue was compatibility between older versions of OpenClaw and this newer version, and the inability to simply ask OpenClaw to update itself.

In a separate review video, he called OpenClaw the most frustrating, disappointing release of the year.

Now, inevitably, a lot of the conversation came back to the comparison between OpenClaw and Hermes.

Responding to one post making that comparison, Hans Rudolph, who does community and dev relations at OpenClaw, said, "We're not selling anything here or asking people to trust one company, one model, or one AI provider because OpenClaw is open source and belongs to the people who use it and help build it.

Then, dozens more.

The installs were being done by Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Noose researchers Hermes.

And someone had already got there.

Real malware, sitting in an unclaimed package slot referenced by a real company's file.