NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / February 20, 2026 / OpenClawd AI today announced an updated release of its managed deployment platform for OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot. The release follows a turbulent week for the OpenClaw ecosystem - its creator Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI on February 14, and the project is now transitioning to an independent open-source foundation.

That transition changes the picture for OpenClaw users in ways that aren't obvious yet.

What OpenClaw's Move to a Foundation Means for Everyday Users

Steinberger wrote in his farewell blog post that his next goal is to "build an agent that even my mum can use." He picked OpenAI as the place to do it. Fair enough. But OpenClaw itself - the 180,000-star GitHub project that people are actually running today - is heading to a foundation structure. That means community governance, volunteer maintainers, and no single company steering the roadmap.

For developers, this is good news. Open-source foundations work. Linux, Kubernetes, and Node.js all thrived under similar models.

For everyone else - the freelancers, small business owners, and non-technical professionals who heard about Clawdbot on Twitter and wanted to try it - the gap just got wider. The project was already hard to set up. Now the person who wrote most of the documentation and onboarding flow is working on something else entirely.

VentureBeat called it plainly: the race to build a safe, deployable version of OpenClaw for regular people is now the central question in the AI agent space.

How OpenClawd Fills the Gap

OpenClawd was built for exactly this moment. The platform takes the full OpenClaw stack - the same Clawdbot codebase that hit 180,000 GitHub stars, the same skills engine with 5,700+ community plugins, the same WhatsApp and Telegram integrations - and packages it behind a setup process that takes under ten minutes with no terminal involved.

Here's what shipped in this release:

• Automatic version tracking - when the OpenClaw foundation pushes updates, OpenClawd rolls them to hosted instances after internal security review

• Pre-configured messaging - WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, and Gmail connected through a visual interface, not YAML files

• Model flexibility - works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and local models, switchable anytime

• Isolated cloud environments - each user gets a dedicated instance, not a shared tenant, eliminating the 135,000+ exposed-instance problem that SecurityScorecard flagged this month

• No hardware requirement - Mac Mini and Raspberry Pi shortages don't apply when your Clawdbot runs in the cloud

"The OpenAI news actually made our case for us," said Danny Wilson, spokesperson for OpenClawd. "People are more excited about OpenClaw than ever. They're also more confused about how to get started than ever. We're the answer to that second part."

OpenClawd Is Independent - Built on OpenClaw, Not Controlled by It

To be clear: OpenClawd is not affiliated with OpenAI, the OpenClaw foundation, or Peter Steinberger. The platform is an independent project that runs on top of the open-source OpenClaw codebase - the same way Vercel runs on top of Next.js, or Managed WordPress hosts run on top of WordPress.

The open-source Moltbot project (now OpenClaw) remains free at github.com/openclaw/openclaw. OpenClawd simply removes the deployment friction for users who don't want to manage infrastructure themselves.

About OpenClawd AI

OpenClawd AI (https://openclawd.ai) provides managed hosting for the OpenClaw open-source AI assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot. The platform removes deployment barriers and applies security defaults automatically, making autonomous AI agents accessible to non-technical users. OpenClawd AI is an independent project.

Contact:

Danny Email: support@openclawd.ai

SOURCE: Openclawd AI