OpenClaw 2.0 Is Here: What Changed, Why It Took Two Months, and How It Stacks Up Against Hermes

OpenClaw shipped its largest replace ever over the weekend. The group calls it OpenClaw 2.0. In addition they referred to as it “unintentional,” which, positive, we’ll get to that.

The release notes contact set up, messaging, reminiscence, abilities, fashions, automations, the browser, native apps, plugins, and safety—mainly all the pieces a person ought to know.

Per the announcement post, 933 contributors, 569 of them first-timers, contributed to the venture with greater than 16,000 pull requests. That is roughly half of each PR OpenClaw has ever merged, shipped in a single launch.

What OpenClaw really is, for the uninitiated

OpenClaw is a self-hosted, open-source framework that turns an LLM into an agent that does not go away whenever you shut the tab. It lives in your machine, wakes up by itself schedule, and talks to you over WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or Sign as an alternative of ready politely in a chat window. Give it permission and it will contact your electronic mail, your calendar, your information, your shell.

Austrian developer Peter Steinberger built it after stepping again from his firm PSPDFKit. His venture gained a document 147,000 GitHub stars in weeks and began an entire ecosystem of spin-offs and one deeply unusual AI-only social community referred to as Moltbook.

Steinberger joined OpenAI in February to run its personal-agent push. OpenClaw itself didn’t be a part of OpenAI. It moved into its personal nonprofit, the OpenClaw Basis, with OpenAI listed as one associate amongst Microsoft, GitHub, Nvidia, Atlassian, and Tencent. Unbiased, allegedly.

Why “by chance” is the best phrase

The plan for this Openclaw replace was really sort of small and targeted on simplifying set up and rebuilding the browser app. That is it.

Then the group really tried to do it correctly, touching reminiscence, fashions, plugins, messaging, and safety. Earlier than this launch, OpenClaw had shipped 106 releases in 230 days—mainly each day. Going seven weeks with out delivery something was, by their very own admission, not regular.

They spent that additional time ensuring current installs would not break on improve, which is fairly regular if in case you have used Openclaw earlier than. Therefore the flashing warning within the launch notes about backing up periods earlier than you contact the brand new SQLite storage.

So “unintentional” just isn’t a advertising line. It is the group admitting scope creep in public. Two small fixes—onboarding, browser—pulled in all the pieces else as a result of all the pieces else touched the identical code they have been already rewriting.

Hannes Rudolph, Openclaw’s Neighborhood Supervisor, frames it as OpenClaw consuming its personal pet food: as soon as the group began working its personal workflow by multiplayer periods, the gaps within the outdated single-user design grew to become too apparent to go away alone. In order that they did not. That is the way you get 16,000 pull requests as an alternative of two.

What’s really new

Setup now begins by checking what you have already got—an current Claude or ChatGPT subscription, an API key, a neighborhood Ollama mannequin—earlier than asking you to configure something new. It exams if the mannequin really works earlier than saving it, then dumps you straight into an actual dialog as an alternative of a settings display no person wished to see.

The Management UI was rebuilt round chat as an alternative of a separate overview dashboard, which places it in the identical visible household as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Recordsdata, Git diffs, pull-request standing, a browser panel, and a terminal all reside across the dialog now as an alternative of forcing you to alt-tab by 5 completely different instruments.

The group claims a simulated latency take a look at lower preliminary JavaScript requests from 140 to 45 and startup time from 1.6 seconds to 575 milliseconds. Quicker is quicker; take the quantity for what it is price.

The multiplayer pitch

The headline characteristic is shared cloud periods—an agent’s work turns into one thing a colleague can stroll into mid-task with out the context evaporating. Steinberger stated on X that his personal group ditched particular person native coding harnesses for a shared setup at group.openclaw.ai, calling native harnesses “relics of the previous.”

Safety caught as much as match. OpenClaw 2.0 provides request-specific approvals, command permissions scoped to particular arguments, extra complicated issues embrace Docker and Podman sandboxing, role-enforced execution, and a team-scoped Secret Retailer that may slot a credential right into a request with out ever exhibiting it to the mannequin.

The catch: sandboxing and approvals are nonetheless off by default. OpenClaw’s personal docs say one Gateway equals one belief area, not a wall between individuals who do not belief one another. If your organization wants precise tenant isolation, you are standing up separate Gateways—OpenClaw calls them “cells”—not flipping a swap.

The competitors is heating up

OpenClaw hasn’t had the sector to itself. Nous Analysis’s Hermes Agent, first tagged in March, constructed its entire pitch round not being OpenClaw: procedural reminiscence that turns profitable workflows into reusable abilities robotically, and safety defaults that do not assume you are the one one that’ll ever contact the machine.

OpenClaw splits a Gateway daemon from the brokers it routes to. Hermes crams the dialog loop, software dispatch, and reminiscence into one agent class—messier to scale, easier to cause about. The overall verdict floating round all yr: OpenClaw wins on ecosystem and channel breadth, Hermes wins on self-improvement and never delivery large open by default.

OpenClaw 2.0’s new sandboxing narrows that hole. It would not shut it. The hardened settings nonetheless require somebody to truly go flip them on.

Find out how to get it

Present customers replace by the traditional CLI path. Learn the positive print first—periods created after the SQLite migration will not present up for those who downgrade later and not using a backup.

New customers undergo OpenClaw’s setup guide, now with guided onboarding throughout Mac, Home windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, and Android, plus staged imports for anybody leaping over from Claude, Codex, or Hermes itself.

It is nonetheless free, nonetheless MIT-licensed, nonetheless dwelling at github.com/openclaw/openclaw.