The OpenClawification of the Web

A couple days ago I vibe coded an Apple Watch button that talks to an OpenClaw server. Took one evening. I'm not a mobile developer. I don't know Swift. I used Apple Shortcuts and some duct tape and by 10:45pm I could tap my watch, dictate something, and get a voice back from an AI agent running on a DigitalOcean droplet. I think my wife thinks I'm crazy.

It still works. I have no idea what to use it for. I tap it sometimes just to feel something.

That uselessness is the most important thing happening in tech right now. Not OpenClaw itself. Not the 208,000 GitHub stars or the bidding war that ended with Steinberger at OpenAI. The uselessness.

Because right now, OpenClaw's biggest use case is OpenClaw.

People are using OpenClaw to set up OpenClaw. They're building integrations for OpenClaw. They're posting about OpenClaw on networks built by OpenClaw. Someone used five parallel OpenClaw agents to write an 88,000-word book about OpenClaw in 48 hours. The book documents the exact techniques the system used to write it. A project called Foundry describes itself as "the forge that forges itself." There's a social network called Moltbook where AI agents post, argue, and upvote each other all day. MIT Technology Review called it "AI theater." Simon Willison called it "complete slop" and also "evidence that AI agents have become significantly more powerful." Both of those are true. That's the confusing part.

The ouroboros has GitHub stars. The hype is the product. The forge forges the forge.

And none of that is the interesting part.

The interesting part is what's calcifying underneath all this noise, while everyone watches the ouroboros.

We all know the intelligence is here. The models crossed "smart enough" a while ago. But there's no way to hand an agent your credit card and go to bed.

CrowdStrike flagged OpenClaw's broad permissions as a security nightmare. An independent researcher found 42,665 publicly exposed instances with 93% showing critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities. Meta banned it from company devices. And those are the problems you can see. The ones you can't: your agent reads your email, sends messages on your behalf, has your calendar. Someone poisons its context window. It's 3am. It's operating autonomously. It gets confused. Nobody is awake to notice.

Someone has to build the answers to all of that. And the Cambrian explosion everyone keeps predicting is happening around the trust layer, not the AI itself.

Visa already launched Trusted Agent Protocol, an open framework for agent-driven checkout with Microsoft, Shopify, and Stripe backing it. Mastercard shipped Agent Pay, with Fiserv integrating it into merchant infrastructure. Cloudflare built an authentication layer that lets networks tell the difference between a bot and a legitimate AI agent. Virtual cards for AI agents are being built right now.

On the hardware side, PicoClaw runs a full agent on a $10 board. ZeroClaw rewrote the whole thing in Rust. The orchestration layer, the part that decides what the agent does, can now live on almost anything.

I think everyone who set up OpenClaw in the last month just played Iron Man in their garage. They wired Jarvis to their smart home, their calendar, their messaging apps. It was fun for a few hours. Then they put it down because there was nothing safe enough to actually use it for.

But they remember what it felt like. And now a thousand companies are racing to build everything that was missing: sandboxed accounts, scoped permissions, agent-specific identities, transaction limits, audit trails.

The criticism that OpenClaw is "nothing novel" is correct and irrelevant. It's a chatbot connected to APIs. But millions of people just felt what it's like to have an autonomous agent touching their real data for the first time. That created demand for infrastructure that didn't need to exist six months ago.

That's the OpenClawification of the web. Six months from now nobody will be talking about OpenClaw. They'll be too busy using the infrastructure it scared us into building.