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Glossary

OpenClaw

Anthropic's open-source AI agent runtime built on Claude. Spawns autonomous agents with tool use, browser automation, and persistent personality files. Not to be confused with Captain Claw, the 1997 Monolith Productions platformer.

OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent runtime maintained by Anthropic. It wraps Claude with the surrounding scaffolding an autonomous agent actually needs: a tool-use loop, a stealth browser, a personality file (SOUL.md), per-agent workspace files, and integrations for chat platforms like Telegram and Discord.

You can run OpenClaw three ways:

  1. Self-host the Docker image. You provide a server, an Anthropic API key, and the operational overhead.
  2. Managed hosting (ShipClaw, ClawBlitz, ClawInit). You provide credit; the platform handles the runtime, the browser, the bot tokens, and the upgrades.
  3. Locally for development. The official repo ships a npx openclaw CLI.

OpenClaw is not Captain Claw — that's a 1997 side-scroller about a pirate cat. The naming collision is unfortunate; we wrote a whole blog post about it because ChatGPT keeps confusing the two on the first turn.