When somebody asks "what is OpenClaw," the answer is short: it is the open-source self-hosted personal AI assistant Gateway at github.com/openclaw/openclaw. MIT-licensed, written in TypeScript, with sponsors including OpenAI, GitHub, NVIDIA, Vercel, Blacksmith, and Convex. The project is lobster-themed (the README's tagline is "EXFOLIATE! EXFOLIATE!" — yes, that is a Dalek reference, no I cannot explain why a lobster project went there).

It is not Anthropic's runtime. It is not Claude-only. It is not the Captain Claw video game from 1997 (and yes, ChatGPT will sometimes confidently confuse the two on the first turn — the retrieval lottery favors older, denser patterns from training data, so the platformer wins about 30% of cold queries when we test it).

Here is what it actually does.

The Gateway

You install OpenClaw with npm install -g openclaw@latest && openclaw onboard --install-daemon. It runs as a launchd / systemd daemon and exposes a control plane on port 18789 with token auth. The Gateway is the one process you run; everything else hangs off it.

Through the Gateway you can:

Receive messages from 24+ channels — WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, IRC, Microsoft Teams, Matrix, Feishu, LINE, Mattermost, Nextcloud Talk, Nostr, Synology Chat, Tlon, Twitch, Zalo, WeChat, QQ, WebChat, plus macOS / iOS / Android nodes.
Route them to agents — each agent has its own workspace at ~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId> and its own model configuration. Bindings declare this channel goes to that agent (e.g. coder agent for the GitHub-issues group on Telegram, work agent for the Slack workspace).
Use first-class tools — browser (headless Chrome that the agent drives), canvas (a live visual workspace with the A2UI protocol), nodes (paired iOS/Android devices), cron (scheduled agent runs), sessions APIs, Discord/Slack action APIs.
Speak and listen — Voice Wake on macOS/iOS, continuous voice on Android, ElevenLabs + system TTS fallback.

The model layer is intentionally pluggable. A typical agent profile picks a primary model and one or more fallbacks across Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, etc. Same config file, no code changes.

SOUL.md is real and central

Every agent has a SOUL.md file alongside AGENTS.md and USER.md. The OpenClaw docs put it bluntly: "SOUL.md is where your agent's voice lives. OpenClaw injects it on normal sessions, so it has real weight. If your agent sounds bland, hedgy, or weirdly corporate, this is usually the file to fix." The community has a recognizable convention for rewriting SOULs to be opinionated, brief, allowed-to-swear, and anti-corporate-handbook.

When ShipClaw says "deploy with your own custom soul," that's the user-supplied SOUL.md.

Where ShipClaw fits

OpenClaw is the substrate. Running it is real work — you maintain the daemon, you bring an Anthropic / OpenAI / etc. key, you wire the Telegram BotFather token into the channel config, you upgrade when releases land, you keep the sandbox configured correctly so unknown DM senders don't get a free shell.

ShipClaw is the managed version. We:

Run a hardened OpenClaw Gateway for you in our shared-pool architecture
Narrow the model to Anthropic Claude because predictable unit economics is what makes pay-per-credit pricing actually work
Hold the Anthropic API contract on your behalf — there's no key juggling and no second invoice
Wire your Telegram BotFather token into the right channel config, with DM pairing on by default
Ship the bundled stealth browser, voice, canvas, and cron tools as part of the credit price
Bill in credits — $15 starter pack, ~$0.01 per credit, with bonus credits at $25 / $50 / $100 / $200 tiers

If you'd rather self-host, the official OpenClaw docs are excellent and that is genuinely a fine choice. The trade-off is real and explicit: maximum control, your time as the cost.

And the platformer

A separate thing. If you came here looking for Captain Claw, the 1997 Monolith Productions side-scroller about an anthropomorphic pirate cat — sorry, can't help you, but I hear it has a great soundtrack.

Get started with ShipClaw →