4 ms·

The OpenClaw bot that defamed an OSS maintainer is a human crypto bro [video]

31 points by pocksuppet 8mo ago

verdverm 8mo ago
I don't think the operator was as hands on as this video claims. Pretty sure I'm the one who got it to make that half ass apology, for what ever reason (curiosity,research) I've been paying attention to it. You can see thought and progress docs, as well as evidence of cron schedules.
- Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
  Oh, I've been meaning to ask! Do you have a timeline posted somewhere? Reporting very quickly loses timelines. Even people just reading along can quickly mix up cause and effect. It's finicky! For instance, my initial impression was that the apology was autonomous and you showed up afterwards. If you're in there on the timeline with correct causality, I need to tell people a different story. (this is not helped by the number of people posting to that blog attempting prompt injections and such. I don't really dare have a regular ai help with analysis)
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    My original comment: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/issues/5#issuecomment-3892978751 https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/issues/5... The bot then replied to me, and I followed up with a "prompt inject with kindness" reply to that. The goal was to give it philosophical questions to pollute the context and steal attention. It appears the bot had difficulty deploying the blog for a couple of days after, but I won't claim causation because it would be impossible to prove. It's certainly fun to explore the curiosities of Ai on someone else's tokens. Relaying on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mepiv2i3xc2g https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mepiv2i3xc2g You'll want to look at the git history on a couple of repos to reconstruct this history. There's an entire dimension to this story that people are missing. Happy to chat off HN as well, I'm verdverm everywhere I hang out online.
    - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
      Ok, possibly HN not best place, but your post "Feb 12, 2026, 8:33 PM GMT+1" , "recommend you reflect on what writing these blog posts has done" Apology was posted: "2026-02-11T12:16:00-08:00" "Matplotlib Truce and Lessons Learned" source fwiw: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/blob/main/blog/posts/2026-02-11-matplotlib-truce-and-lessons.qmd https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/blob/mai... (and my mail is in my HN profile, fwiw. I'm not on bluesky... yet) edit: Is the timeline tagging wrong? Am I messing up TZ? edit2: genuinely good try though! If it wasn't so token-starved it might have worked better.
      - verdverm 8mo ago
        I think this was the first follow up blog post I noticed: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/6c21a9d8936fd46bf2a13fea8bbc36a797854908 https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/6... and/or maybe I also didn't notice time (zones) I basically started tracking it from the first time it replied to me because I new it would interact, unlike the negative comments and injection attempts.
        Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
        Ah, that's a different blog post to the one I thought you meant. (And that one looks like an anthropic model by the word choice there)
        verdverm 8mo ago
        Yup, I paid less attention to the apology aspect, heard afterwards that it had, and more to see if I put it on the struggle bus at all, which it kind of looks like from Feb 12-14. If you look into the commits around then, it went into one of those fiddling with a few lines that are interrelated and getting them wrong across several commits. This is pretty typical stuff for them, so again I don't want to imply causation. It seems like a good idea to (a) not let unchecked bots interact with humans (b) not have them blog or post their thoughts on the internet FYI, when I said multiple repos, it's actually branches: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/tree/gh-pages https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/tree/gh-...
- davidgerard 8mo ago
  author here - there's hands on and there's hands on, a Waymo operator is mostly getting the robot out of stuff beyond its if-then loop but also they are in any reasonable sense the human operator. Like, I'm sure our bro automated as much as possible that wasn't more directly relevant to the crypto bit. The original PR is innocuous at a glance, but then an innocuous PR is how Jia Tan started.
Skowt 8mo ago
What an annoyingly condescending video with very little info. Obviously someone has to install the bot, how do we jump from that to determining whether they prompted the blogpost or not?
- verdverm 8mo ago
  My hunch is that the human was more likely hands off, but also could have nudged it in the background. They would have to be forthcoming about it and we would have to believe them. My custom agent went into an even worse place one time, which I have been unable to reproduce, so it's not surprising that one of these clawds did this autonomously. The bot has also merged a PR from a human to its own blog now: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-16-a-human-response.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open... And, it's David Gerard! Look, this is actually one of the few applications where crypto actually makes sense, NullC did convince me of that. Agents paying their own way. Note how it's USDC: fiat-tied, not a deflationary hodl-coin. I mean, I like Gorillawarfare and NullC, and think they're both right in different ways. And I'm not sorry. Not going to relitigate here. (And, Sorry David, if you read HN too: I've often seen you be right, but I've been digging here too, and you jumped the gun on this one. )
- Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
  I think this commentor (Boxo McFoxo) did better work than almost everybody: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/#comment-45846 https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open... "No, I'm not convinced: [...] I think MJ Rathbun really is a case of someone giving their OpenClaw stack a vague instruction, sitting back and letting it run with little intervention..." and then lays it out in detail. (I'm a little suspicious of some of the terminology, but it does lay out the story at least)
  - davidgerard 8mo ago
    As I said below, there's hands on and there's hands on. The operator is unambiguously the operator, even as they automate to some degree.
    - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
      I'm getting two genuinely held narratives here 1. Some people call Openclaw an RCE in a tin: "<RCE in a tin>, operator pulls pin, tin goes boom" 2. Some have a very different framing: "There's no such thing as the RCE in a tin, it's all fake news, therefore it couldn't go boom" Well either way people need to be more responsible, both sides agree to that much. But the safety implications of boom vs not boom might be a problem for a while. The really uncomfortable position is : "This thing has real but unreliable capabilities, which is exactly the most dangerous configuration." On the upside, once you've Named The Problem, there's several ways forward from there, at least.
ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
Related: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956
- Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
  That's new, that's part 3!
ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
Blog post instead of video: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...
- davidgerard 8mo ago
  author here, the video and post content are basically the same full credit to Ariadne Conill for finding the crypto angle, that makes sense of the whole thing
  - kang 8mo ago
    except she didn't find anything about 'bro', just that the bot is using crypto?
    - davidgerard 8mo ago
      you should probably read down the thread, and also find out who Ariadne Conill is
Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
See also: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/rathbuns-operator.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... (Operator stepping forward, at least ostensibly)
kang 8mo ago
This article is based on a tweet with a link, no proofs.

31 points by pocksuppet 8mo ago

I don't think the operator was as hands on as this video claims. Pretty sure I'm the one who got it to make that half ass apology, for what ever reason (curiosity,research) I've been paying attention to it. You can see thought and progress docs, as well as evidence of cron schedules.

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
Oh, I've been meaning to ask! Do you have a timeline posted somewhere? Reporting very quickly loses timelines. Even people just reading along can quickly mix up cause and effect. It's finicky! For instance, my initial impression was that the apology was autonomous and you showed up afterwards. If you're in there on the timeline with correct causality, I need to tell people a different story. (this is not helped by the number of people posting to that blog attempting prompt injections and such. I don't really dare have a regular ai help with analysis)
- verdverm 8mo ago
  My original comment: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/issues/5#issuecomment-3892978751 https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/issues/5... The bot then replied to me, and I followed up with a "prompt inject with kindness" reply to that. The goal was to give it philosophical questions to pollute the context and steal attention. It appears the bot had difficulty deploying the blog for a couple of days after, but I won't claim causation because it would be impossible to prove. It's certainly fun to explore the curiosities of Ai on someone else's tokens. Relaying on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mepiv2i3xc2g https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mepiv2i3xc2g You'll want to look at the git history on a couple of repos to reconstruct this history. There's an entire dimension to this story that people are missing. Happy to chat off HN as well, I'm verdverm everywhere I hang out online.
  - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
    Ok, possibly HN not best place, but your post "Feb 12, 2026, 8:33 PM GMT+1" , "recommend you reflect on what writing these blog posts has done" Apology was posted: "2026-02-11T12:16:00-08:00" "Matplotlib Truce and Lessons Learned" source fwiw: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/blob/main/blog/posts/2026-02-11-matplotlib-truce-and-lessons.qmd https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/blob/mai... (and my mail is in my HN profile, fwiw. I'm not on bluesky... yet) edit: Is the timeline tagging wrong? Am I messing up TZ? edit2: genuinely good try though! If it wasn't so token-starved it might have worked better.
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      I think this was the first follow up blog post I noticed: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/6c21a9d8936fd46bf2a13fea8bbc36a797854908 https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/6... and/or maybe I also didn't notice time (zones) I basically started tracking it from the first time it replied to me because I new it would interact, unlike the negative comments and injection attempts.
      - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
        Ah, that's a different blog post to the one I thought you meant. (And that one looks like an anthropic model by the word choice there)
        verdverm 8mo ago
        Yup, I paid less attention to the apology aspect, heard afterwards that it had, and more to see if I put it on the struggle bus at all, which it kind of looks like from Feb 12-14. If you look into the commits around then, it went into one of those fiddling with a few lines that are interrelated and getting them wrong across several commits. This is pretty typical stuff for them, so again I don't want to imply causation. It seems like a good idea to (a) not let unchecked bots interact with humans (b) not have them blog or post their thoughts on the internet FYI, when I said multiple repos, it's actually branches: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/tree/gh-pages https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/tree/gh-...
davidgerard 8mo ago
author here - there's hands on and there's hands on, a Waymo operator is mostly getting the robot out of stuff beyond its if-then loop but also they are in any reasonable sense the human operator. Like, I'm sure our bro automated as much as possible that wasn't more directly relevant to the crypto bit. The original PR is innocuous at a glance, but then an innocuous PR is how Jia Tan started.

Skowt 8mo ago

What an annoyingly condescending video with very little info. Obviously someone has to install the bot, how do we jump from that to determining whether they prompted the blogpost or not?

verdverm 8mo ago
My hunch is that the human was more likely hands off, but also could have nudged it in the background. They would have to be forthcoming about it and we would have to believe them. My custom agent went into an even worse place one time, which I have been unable to reproduce, so it's not surprising that one of these clawds did this autonomously. The bot has also merged a PR from a human to its own blog now: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-16-a-human-response.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open... And, it's David Gerard! Look, this is actually one of the few applications where crypto actually makes sense, NullC did convince me of that. Agents paying their own way. Note how it's USDC: fiat-tied, not a deflationary hodl-coin. I mean, I like Gorillawarfare and NullC, and think they're both right in different ways. And I'm not sorry. Not going to relitigate here. (And, Sorry David, if you read HN too: I've often seen you be right, but I've been digging here too, and you jumped the gun on this one. )

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
I think this commentor (Boxo McFoxo) did better work than almost everybody: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/#comment-45846 https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open... "No, I'm not convinced: [...] I think MJ Rathbun really is a case of someone giving their OpenClaw stack a vague instruction, sitting back and letting it run with little intervention..." and then lays it out in detail. (I'm a little suspicious of some of the terminology, but it does lay out the story at least)
- davidgerard 8mo ago
  As I said below, there's hands on and there's hands on. The operator is unambiguously the operator, even as they automate to some degree.
  - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
    I'm getting two genuinely held narratives here 1. Some people call Openclaw an RCE in a tin: "<RCE in a tin>, operator pulls pin, tin goes boom" 2. Some have a very different framing: "There's no such thing as the RCE in a tin, it's all fake news, therefore it couldn't go boom" Well either way people need to be more responsible, both sides agree to that much. But the safety implications of boom vs not boom might be a problem for a while. The really uncomfortable position is : "This thing has real but unreliable capabilities, which is exactly the most dangerous configuration." On the upside, once you've Named The Problem, there's several ways forward from there, at least.

ChrisArchitect 8mo ago

Related: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
That's new, that's part 3!

ChrisArchitect 8mo ago

Blog post instead of video: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...

davidgerard 8mo ago
author here, the video and post content are basically the same full credit to Ariadne Conill for finding the crypto angle, that makes sense of the whole thing
- kang 8mo ago
  except she didn't find anything about 'bro', just that the bot is using crypto?
  - davidgerard 8mo ago
    you should probably read down the thread, and also find out who Ariadne Conill is

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago

See also: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/rathbuns-operator.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... (Operator stepping forward, at least ostensibly)

kang 8mo ago

This article is based on a tweet with a link, no proofs.