Openclaw Is a Glimpse of the Future. It’s Also a Security Wake-Up Call.

Every so often, technology gives you a glimpse of the future. It's magical, but also unfinished and dangerous.

That’s the experience of using Openclaw.

In the first two weeks of launch, the open source AI agent platform attracted more than 100,000 users. It spread mostly by word of mouth with screenshots flying across social media showing personal assistants that build websites, deliver sophisticated research notes and automate workflows right from WhatsApp or Telegram.

The experience looks and feels like the future. But with our current understanding of security, it is not something we are ready for.

The assistant that lives where you live

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude and others, Openclaw doesn’t build a new interface for AI. Instead, it brings AI to the interfaces that people already use.

Your agent can live inside WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord or Slack. There, in a simple chat window that sits alongside conversations with your friends and family, it can carry out all the tasks an AI would perform, and more.

It can build a website in minutes, read, summarise and even send emails for you, and manage your calendar.

The difference here is not intelligence. The models powering it come from OpenAI, Anthropic or anything you choose to hook up to the system. The killer app is integration.

Like a true personal assistant or intern, Openclaw connects your AI to the services, apps, files and accounts that you use, but it can do even more. Openclaw lets users extend the capabilities through custom “skills” that unlock even more power.

So this is not another run of the mill chatbot. It is a primitive version of what Meta, Google, Apple and any other consumer internet company want to ship at global scale.

Openclaw feels like a breakthrough in how we will use the internet in the future. It feels comparable to how Napster changed digital music distribution, and the way social media like Facebook redefined communication at a global scale.

In those cases, though, we severely underestimated the security risks that both of these movements brought with them.

Its strength is also its weakness

Openclaw’s dexterity is its superpower, but that is also its biggest risk. When a platform can connect to everything, as it does, that means it can also access everything.

Users are strongly advised to install it on a separate machine, be it a Mac Mini or a virtual private server, far away from their primary workspace. That advice tells you this is frontier technology that could go spectacularly wrong.

Setting up Openclaw requires real technical understanding to deal with OAuth tokens, API keys, and server permissions. It’s manageable for experienced developers, but an obstacle course on a minefield that few will complete.

One single misconfigured permission or an exposed token doesn’t just break a feature. It can expose sensitive data, leak credentials or grant unintended access to personal and professional systems.

The more capable the agent becomes, the more catastrophic a mistake can be. 

You can ask it to write new automation scripts, it can modify its behavior, debug itself and make other tweaks. All without you needing to know how to code.

That automation is incredible, but it does not equal safety. A system that can write code is capable of writing insecure code. A system that can connect services can connect them in unsafe ways. All without centralised oversight.

Researchers have already identified 40,000 exposed Openclaw instances, and many ‘skills’ were developed to contain malicious instructions.

It’s a simple concept, but one that’s easily capable of going wrong. Not unlike password security.

We all know that reusing passwords is dangerous. Tools like 1Password, LastPass and other managers exist to enforce best practices and simplify the situation. But millions of people still use obvious passwords across multiple services.

Now imagine that dynamic applied to AI agents with direct access to your accounts, emails, storage, company data and more. The stakes are no longer just logins. We are dealing with a network of  identity, intellectual property and infrastructure, and agents that don’t sit around idle.

Security and trust is the product

With its digital assistant in your pocket, Openclaw demonstrates exactly what major platforms aspire to deliver. 

The direction of travel is clear, but there is a crucial missing piece. That’s trust.

Mass market adoption does not happen when something feels powerful. It happens when something feels safe, and there are horror stories of Openclaw going wrong.

In the case of Openclaw-like AI agents, that’s likely to look like.

• Reduced power and functionality to ensure control
• Granular and clear permission system
• Clearly verifiable identity for agents and users
• Strong separation between personal and professional environments 
• Secure key management that does not rely on user configuration
• Clear accountability for actions taken by autonomous agents

Privacy will define the next era of AI adoption, as we wrote recently. Openclaw just accelerated the timeline

An AI agent is effectively a superuser account for your digital life. It needs the equivalent of enterprise grade identity and access management, and best-in-class data security. Hobbyist level configuration will not cut it.

Openclaw is a thrilling glimpse of what’s possible. If this is the future of how we interact with the internet, then security should not be a footnote. It should be the product itself.