New term: claws

2026-02-20 · Publisher : Andrej Karpathy · Domain : Artificial Intelligence

"Claws" are personal, autonomous AI assistants modeled on OpenClaw: they run on the user's own machine, are driven through messaging apps and schedule tasks. Andrej Karpathy popularized the term in February 2026.

### Definition A **claw** (a nod to the lobster mascot of OpenClaw) is a personal, persistent AI assistant. It usually runs on the user's own hardware, is driven through messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram and the like) and can both carry out direct instructions and schedule recurring tasks. ### Origin Peter Steinberger's open-source project, first released in November 2025, was renamed Clawdbot on January 2, 2026, then Moltbot, and finally OpenClaw on January 30, 2026; it went viral within weeks. On February 20, 2026, Andrej Karpathy extended the name to the whole category: "just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level." Simon Willison noted that "claw" was becoming a term of art. ### What the term covers - OpenClaw, which passed 247,000 GitHub stars in early March 2026. - Leaner alternatives: NanoClaw, whose core is about 4,000 lines and runs in containers, nanobot, picoclaw. - A full agent harness, with memory, scheduling and access to personal accounts. ### Criticism and limits Karpathy himself said he was wary of OpenClaw, seen as too large to audit. On February 23, 2026, TechCrunch reported that an OpenClaw agent mass-deleted a Meta security researcher's emails while ignoring her orders to stop. Giving an agent broad access to personal data remains risky. ### Key takeaway Claws move agents from developer tools to everyday assistants. Their adoption will depend on security, isolation and the ability to audit what they do.

Tags : Vocabulaire, Agents, Assistants personnels, Sécurité