WE ARE COOKING!! Three of @openclaw’s four biggest weeks for npm downloads have been this September. Thank you to everyone sharing feedback and to all our community contributors making this possible!

This is INSANE! To date @openclaw has had 106 stable releases and this release alone accounts for roughly 49% of ALL PRs merges (22% of all commits) to the codebase. Note: v2026.8.1 is currently finishing its final release workflows so it will be out soon.

Is OpenClaw DEAD? My name is Hannes Rudolph and I work at the OpenClaw Foundation. Our initial media attention has faded and some people left after real failures, but npm downloads have grown from about 176,000 a day across February and April to about 422,000 a day across June and July through July 20. That is far from a dead project. As @openclaw has scaled scaled, we went through a rough period from April through June when updates broke working installs and too many users spent their time recovering instead of using the product. That damaged trust with people who needed reliability, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Quite frankly, we are not totally out of the woods yet because v2026.7.1 caused issues with some installs, although it has shown increased overall stability after recovery. I think the people getting the most out of OpenClaw today are hackers, tinkerers, and businesses willing to put real work into shaping it around their workflows. That includes homelab management, calendars, and job searches, a twice-weekly workflow that surfaced a role one day after it was posted and helped prepare the application that led to an offer, and inventory, purchasing, and other business workflows with varying levels of human oversight. I also think the bar to getting useful work out of OpenClaw is far too high because onboarding and setup ask too much, day-to-day use needs to be simpler, and stability problems can stop people before they reach those workflows. Our next update focuses on lowering that bar with streamlined onboarding and setup, simpler overall use, and another major round of stability improvements. To anyone stuck in a “fuck OpenClaw” or “fuck Hermes” mindset, I do not buy the us-versus-them BS. The folks at Hermes are great, and if Hermes works for you, good stuff, use it! Turning projects into rival camps creates drama, spreads misinformation, and makes the community hostile to people simply looking for accurate answers and the tool that works best for them. Criticism is part of how we get better, but unsupported conspiracy theories and personal speculation about the people involved can be hurtful and damaging, and repeating them as fact is not criticism. The claim that OpenClaw was manufactured to get @steipete a job at @OpenAI has no evidence behind it, and the same goes for other theories about his role there unless evidence supports them. OpenClaw is now stewarded by an independent nonprofit foundation with a full-time team, the source remains public, and Peter still makes many technical calls. OpenClaw is strong because of the people who build it, review it, test it, report problems, help each other, and keep showing up. We love the hell out of this community, and we will keep listening, strengthening the relationships we already have, forging new ones, and building a harness we know is changing the world. No OpenClaw is not dead. We're just getting started.

OpenClaw or BrokenClaw? First off, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Hannes Rudolph, and I’m the new Community Manager here at OpenClaw. Nice to meet you. I want to acknowledge the frustration many of you have felt with OpenClaw’s stability. We’ve broken your claws, and that sucks. We’ve made some real progress recently, but there’s still work to do and we’re going to keep at it. We understand how frustrating it is to deal with repeated issues, especially when our public response has been lacklustre and hasn’t matched the seriousness of the problems you’re experiencing. For anyone who wants to look at one data point showing how stability has changed over time, there’s an independent public tracker here: We didn’t make it, and we don’t think any single tracker is infallible or tells the whole story. But it does help show how bad things got and where we are now. It’s a useful reference point, not a substitute for listening to people directly or looking at the issues they’re still having. OpenClaw is nothing without the people who use it, build with it, question it, and help shape where it goes. We know that because many of us were frustrated users before joining the project. We care about this community, and we want this community to be a place where people can get help, share ideas, and be honest about what is and isn’t working. That means we need to listen when people are angry, engage when things are confusing, and make it easier for people to participate rather than shutting them down. Please keep being vocal about what isn’t working. We’ll do our best to route feedback to the development team quickly and with the importance it deserves. I can merge things when needed, and we’re not interested in hiding behind process while users are dealing with broken or frustrating behaviour. We’ve heard you. Now we need to show that we have. Hannes