A new AI assistant has taken the tech world by storm over the past few days and it’s not from any of the usual suspects like Google, Apple or Microsoft. This is an open-source project that exploded from a niche developer tool into a full-blown phenomenon complete with Mac Mini buying sprees, serious security concerns and a forced name change that happened just yesterday.
The assistant is called Moltbot. If that name sounds unfamiliar you probably know it better as Clawdbot. Which is what everyone called it until Anthropic stepped in with trademark concerns. The rebrand happened fast but the buzz around this tool hasn’t slowed down.
What Is Clawdbot?
Moltbot (Clawdbot) is an AI assistant that runs on your own computer instead of living in some company’s cloud. You can connect it to basically all your messaging apps at once like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Signal and iMessage. Message it from any platform and it remembers your entire conversation history because everything gets stored as simple text files on your machine.
The real difference is that Moltbot actually does things instead of just talking. Need to check your calendar? It pulls up your schedule. Want to send an email or run code on your computer? It handles that. One user called it a junior system administrator who never sleeps. Which honestly captures what makes this different from asking Siri to set a timer.
You can tell it to monitor your inbox and automatically schedule meetings or have it check your calendar each morning and send you a briefing without you asking. The system is agentic, meaning it takes action on its own rather than waiting for constant instructions.
The Sudden Mac Mini Craze
Something unexpected happened as word spread about Moltbot. People started buying Apple Mac Minis like crazy. The reason? You need a computer running all day to keep Moltbot active and Mac Minis hit the sweet spot of being small, quiet, energy efficient and reasonably priced.
Logan Kilpatrick, a product manager at Google DeepMind, tweeted that he ordered a Mac mini as he joined the rush. Google searches for Mac Mini spiked over four days. One developer even posted screenshots showing 12 Mac Minis being configured at the same time. That’s a shopping spree worth more than $7,000 just for running AI assistants.
It reminds me of when cryptocurrency mining made graphics cards impossible to find except now it’s AI tools driving the hardware shortage instead of Bitcoin.
How Fast Did This Thing Blow Up?
Peter Steinberger built Moltbot as a personal project. He’s an Austrian developer who founded the document software company PSPDFKit which is now called Nutrient. He wanted something to manage his calendar and smart home without sending all his data to corporate servers.
The GitHub repository sat relatively quiet for months with around 10,000 stars. Then last weekend everything changed. The project jumped to nearly 30,000 stars within days. The Discord community swelled past 8,900 members. Over 156 people started actively contributing code.
Nobody’s entirely sure what triggered the explosion. Probably a combination of AI hype hitting critical mass, frustration with locked down corporate assistants and genuine curiosity about what an open-source AI helper could actually accomplish. The community has already built over 100 ready to use skills that anyone can plug into their setup.
Security Researchers Found Major Problems
As Moltbot gained popularity security researchers started investigating. What they discovered was troubling.
SlowMist is a blockchain security firm that found more than 900 Moltbot instances running online without any password protection. These weren’t harmless test servers. They were actively leaking private data. Anthropic API keys that cost real money, Telegram tokens, Slack credentials and months of personal chat histories were just sitting exposed for anyone to grab.
Security researcher Jamieson O’Reilly publicly flagged the issue and warned that hundreds of API keys and private conversations were at risk. The Moltbot documentation now includes urgent warnings about enabling password authentication and proper security configuration before running anything.
This reveals the tradeoff with open-source tools. You get complete control and transparency but security becomes your responsibility. Corporate assistants handle this automatically while potentially scanning your data for their own purposes. With Moltbot protecting your information is entirely on you.
The Name Change Nobody Saw Coming
Yesterday Anthropic contacted Steinberger about the project’s name. The issue was that Clawdbot and its assistant persona Clawd were too similar to Claude ai which is Anthropic’s flagship AI product.
This creates an ironic situation since most Moltbot users actually run Claude as their underlying AI model. The project exists partly because Claude excels at complex reasoning and multi-step tasks. But Anthropic has invested millions building their brand and having a viral third party tool with a nearly identical name obviously creates confusion.
Steinberger and his team moved fast. Within hours they rolled out completely new branding. Clawdbot became Moltbot. Clawd became Molty. The Twitter handle switched to @moltbot and a fresh domain went live at molt.bot.
The team posted that Anthropic asked them to change the name because of trademark stuff but honestly Molt fits perfectly because it’s what lobsters do to grow. They kept their lobster mascot too. The project has maintained a crustacean theme from the beginning which somehow makes this whole saga more entertaining.
The transition wasn’t entirely smooth. Scammers immediately hijacked the old Twitter handle to promote fake cryptocurrency tokens. A bogus CLAWD token briefly hit an $8.48 million market cap before crashing. Steinberger had to coordinate with Twitter and GitHub to recover control of the abandoned accounts.
Why This Feels Different From Siri or Alexa
Traditional voice assistants are locked down by design. You can only do what the company permits. Your data lives on their servers and they control what integrations exist.
Moltbot reverses that model completely. Everything runs on hardware you own. The code is open-source so anyone can inspect it, modify it or add features. If you want new functionality you or the community can just build it instead of waiting for Apple or Amazon to approve your feature request.
What This Means for AI Assistants
Moltbot’s viral moment reveals something about where we are with AI technology right now. People clearly want assistants that feel genuinely useful rather than glorified search engines. They want tools that integrate with their actual workflows instead of separate apps they need to remember to check.
There’s also growing interest in self hosted and privacy focused alternatives to big tech platforms. Running your own AI on your own hardware means nobody’s scanning your conversations for advertising or training future models on your personal data.
The security issues show this isn’t consumer ready yet. You need comfort with command line tools, server configuration and basic security practices. This remains very much a power user playground.
Is Moltbot Worth Trying?
For developers, tinkerers or early adopters comfortable with technical configuration. Moltbot is genuinely impressive. The ability to connect multiple messaging platforms while actually controlling your computer makes it feel like the AI assistant promised years ago.
But if you’re expecting an out of the box experience like Alexa this isn’t it. You’ll need to bring your own API keys which cost money. You’ll need to secure your setup properly or risk exposing your data. And you’ll probably need to troubleshoot various issues.
The community is active and helpful but this is early stage software experiencing explosive growth. Features break. Documentation falls behind. Security best practices are still being established.
The team posted during the rebrand that their mission stays the same. AI that actually does things. That core vision remains unchanged despite the new name.
Whether Molty catches on as quickly as Clawd did is uncertain. Name recognition matters especially for viral projects. But the fundamental appeal hasn’t changed. A powerful self hosted AI assistant you completely control. For people willing to invest the setup time it’s the most capable personal AI assistant available right now assuming you don’t accidentally leave it exposed to the internet.
