If you have been following the AI agent space this week, you probably noticed that Clawdbot—the open-source assistant that went viral on X—has officially changed its name to Moltbot. The change happened quickly, and it turns out there was a very specific reason for the sudden shift.
Why the name change?
The rebrand wasn't just a proactive choice by the team. The founder, Peter, revealed on X that the change came after he received an email from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude LLM. Given that the name "Clawdbot" was a clear play on "Claude," Anthropic reached out to address the trademark issue.
To avoid a legal dispute and keep the project moving, Peter decided to rename the tool to Moltbot. He explained that "Molt" represents the idea of shedding an old shell to grow—a fitting metaphor for a project that had to change its identity overnight.
Where to find the Moltbot project now
If you are looking for the code or want to contribute, the project has moved to a new GitHub organization: https://github.com/moltbot. Most of the old links should redirect, but it is a good idea to update your bookmarks.
If you want to see what people are saying about the change or the tool itself, there isn't a dedicated Moltbot subreddit just yet. However, there are active discussions happening in several related communities. You can find people talking about it on r/LocalLLM, r/SaaS, r/ClaudeAI, and r/artificial.
Current challenges and future risks
Beyond the trademark issue, Moltbot is already facing other hurdles. Peter recently mentioned dealing with crypto-related issues, where bad actors have been trying to associate the project with various tokens or scams. This is a common problem for viral open-source projects, but it adds a layer of community management stress that the team has to navigate.
Looking ahead, Moltbot’s current product model—an autonomous agent with high system privileges—suggests a few other potential risks:
• Platform Friction: Since Moltbot relies on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram as its primary interface, it is at the mercy of their terms of service. If these platforms decide that autonomous bots performing system-level tasks are a security risk, they could easily throttle or ban the accounts used to run Moltbot.
• The "Official" Competition: As big companies like OpenAI or Anthropic release their own deeply integrated system agents, a third-party tool like Moltbot might struggle to maintain its edge in terms of ease of use and system stability.
• Maintenance Burden: Because Moltbot can execute shell commands and control browsers, every update to an underlying library or a change in a website's structure could break its "skills." Keeping up with these changes requires a very active and disciplined contributor base.
Is Moltbot still safe to use?
Even with the new name, the way the tool works remains the same. It is still an autonomous agent that needs significant access to your system to do its job. This means the security questions people were asking about Clawdbot are still just as relevant for Moltbot.
We previously took a deep look at the security challenges facing autonomous agents like Moltbot, covering things like how it handles your API keys and the risks of giving an AI shell access. If you are planning to set it up, it is worth understanding those risks first.
It is still early days for Moltbot, and it will be interesting to see how the community continues to build on it now that it has its own identity and is navigating these early growing pains.
