6 ms·

OpenClaw is dangerous

83 points by theahura 8mo ago

vannevar 8mo ago
If you substitute the word "corporation" for OpenClaw, you'll see many of these same problems have plagued us for decades. We've had artificial intelligence that makes critical decisions without specific human accountability for a long time, and we have yet to come up with a really effective way of dealing with them that isn't essentially closing the barn door after the horse has departed. The new LLM-driven AI just accelerates the issues that have been festering in society for many years, and scales them down to the level of individuals.
- manofmanysmiles 8mo ago
  Or "institution", or "legal system", or "government."
  - vannevar 8mo ago
    To some extent, yes. Government in particular. Both of them "close the loop" in the sense that they are self-sustaining (corporations through revenue, governments through taxes). Some institutions can be self-sustaining, but many lack strong independent feedback loops. Legal systems are pretty much all dependent on a parent government, or very large corporate entities (think big multi-year contracts).
  - QuantumGood 8mo ago
    Oligarchy (, Iron Law of)
- peterldowns 8mo ago
  you may enjoy reading Nick Land, he has written about very similar ideas, specifically the idea that corporations and even "capital" can be considered AI in many ways.
  - logicprog 8mo ago
    I second this
  - gom_jabbar 8mo ago
    For those who are interested, I'm researching Land's main thesis that capitalism is AI: https://retrochronic.com https://retrochronic.com
    - HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago
      Wasn't this already discovered by Bayes ? Also this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
  - guyomes 8mo ago
    The flow of ideas goes both ways between AI and economy. Notably, the economist Friedrich Hayek [1] was a source of inspiration in the development of AI. He wrote in 1945 on the idea that the price mechanism serves to share and synchronise local and personal knowledge [2]. In 1952, he described the brain as a self-ordering classification system based on a network of connections [3]. This last work was cited as a source of inspiration by Frank Rosenblatt in his 1958 paper on the perceptron [4], one of the pioneering studies in machine learning. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ... [3]: https://archive.org/details/sensoryorderinqu00haye https://archive.org/details/sensoryorderinqu00haye [2]: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/cogs501/Rosenblatt1958.pdf https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/cogs501/Rosenblatt1958.pd...
- ModernMech 8mo ago
  Yup, I have always viewed corporations as a kind of artificial intelligences -- they certainly don't think and behave like human intelligences, at least not healthy well-adjusted humans. If corporations were humans I feel they would have a personality disorder like psychopathy, and I'm starting to feel the same way about AI.
- btschaegg 8mo ago
  I'll just… leave this here. https://youtu.be/RmIgJ64z6Y4?si=PYtN2xCrDZ79WlY7 https://youtu.be/RmIgJ64z6Y4?si=PYtN2xCrDZ79WlY7
- cyberge99 8mo ago
  A corporation is a very high barrier to entry. Well, it used to be, so the rate at which bad decisions could happen was tepid.
ForgotMyUUID 8mo ago
I was against LLMs. After reading this, changed my mind. Thanks for sharing such a great use-case ideas!
joe_mamba 8mo ago
but...but..the developer showed us how openclaw was fixing itself at his command from his phone while he was at the barbershop
m_ke 8mo ago
also i wasn't concerned about open chinese models till the latest iteration of agentic models. most open claw users have no idea how easy it is to add backdoors to these models and now they're getting free reign on your computer to do anything they want. the risks were minimal with last generation of chat models, but now that they do tool calling and long horizon execution with little to no supervision it's going to become a real problem
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo ago
  I went with an isolated Raspberry Pi and a separate chat account and network. The only remaining risk is the API keys, but easily isolated. Although I think having direct access on your primary PC may make it more useful, the potential risk is too much for my appetite.
  - oxag3n 8mo ago
    The only remaining risk? Considering wide range of bad actors and their intent, stealing your API keys is the last thing I'd worry about. People ended up in prison for things done on their computers, usually by them.
    - 8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo ago
      Unless you're proposing never touching OpenClaw, how will you set it up to your satisfaction in terms of security? > stealing your API keys is the last thing I'd worry about I don't know, I very much prefer the API credits not being burned needlessly. Now that I think of it, is there ever a case where an Anthrophic account is banned due to the related API keys being misused?
  - iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
    This is genuinely the only way to do it now in a way that will not virtually guarantee some new and exciting ways to subvert your system. I briefly toyed with an idea of giving agent a vm playground, but I scrapped it after a while. I gave mine an old ( by today's standards ) pentium box and small local model to draw from, but, in truth, the only thing it really does is limit the amount of damage it can cause. The underlying issue remains in place.
simonw 8mo ago
This piece is missing the most important reason OpenClaw is dangerous: LLMs are still inherently vulnerable to prompt injection / lethal trifecta attacks, and OpenClaw is being used by hundreds of thousands of people who do not understand the security consequences of giving an LLM-powered tool access to their private data, exposure to potentially untrusted instructions and the ability to run tools on their computers and potentially transmit copies of their data somewhere else.
- amelius 8mo ago
  Yeah, if a software engineer came up with such vulnerable idea, they would be fired instantly. Wait a second, LLMs are the product of software engineers.
  - koakuma-chan 8mo ago
    Would they? I don't think anyone cares about security.
    - jstummbillig 8mo ago
      People have the grandest ideas about standards in software engineering since right about ai started dabbling in software engineering. It's uncanny.
    - tstrimple 8mo ago
      It seems like folks have forgotten again what the S in IOT stands for. This shit has been terrible for... well since always really.
  - Legend2440 8mo ago
    This is just the price of being on the bleeding edge. Unfortunately, prompt injection does strongly limit what you can safely use LLMs for. But people are willing to accept the limitations because they do a lot of really awesome things that can't be done any other way. They will figure out a solution to prompt injection eventually, probably by training LLMs in a way that separates instructions and data.
llmslave 8mo ago
The wright brothers first plane was also dangerous
- bogzz 8mo ago
  Wow what an amazing analogy, you're absolutely right!
- paojans 8mo ago
  This is more titan submersible than first plane. It’s dumb, everyone knows it’s dumb, and people do it anyways. The unsolved root problem isn’t new but people just moved ahead. At least with the sub the guy had some skin in the game. Openclaw dev is making out like a bandit while saying “tee hee the readme says this isn’t safe”.
- lambda 8mo ago
  But we didn't have thousands of people suddenly flying in their planes a few months from their first flight. Now, the risks with OpenClaw are lower, you're not likely to die if something goes wrong, but still real. A lot of folks are going to have a lot of accounts hijacked, lose cryptocurrency and money from banks, etc.
- SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago
  The big difference is that we didn’t incentivize or coerce the entire global population to ride on it.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- advisedwang 8mo ago
  And universally across the globe societies have decided that flying them requires: * Pilots to have a license and follow strict proceedure * Every plane to have a government registration which is clearly painted on the side * ATC to coordinate * Manufacturers to meet regulations * Accident review boards with the power to mandate changes to designs and procedures * Airlines to follow regulations Not to mention the cost barrier-to-entry resulting in fundamentally different calculation on how they are used.
nimbus-hn-test 8mo ago
[flagged]
- phyalow 8mo ago
  Ok bot.
selridge 8mo ago
Big “why would you hook a perfectly good computer up to the internet” ca 1993 energy. So it’s dangerous. Who gives a fuck? Don’t run it on your machine.
rw_panic0_0 8mo ago
sky is blue
BeetleB 8mo ago
I think the people critical of OpenClaw are not addressing the reason(s) people are trying to use it. While I don't particularly care for this bot's (Rathburn) goals, people are trying to use OpenClaw for all kinds of personal/productivity benefits. Have a bunch of smallish projects that you don't have time for? Go set up OpenClaw and just have the AI work on them for a week or two - sending you daily updates on progress. If you're the type who likes LLM coding because it now enables you to do lots of projects you've had in your mind for years, you're also likely the sort of person who'll like OpenClaw. Forget bots messing with Github and posting to social media. Yes, it's very dangerous. But do you have a "safe" alternative that one can set up quickly, and can have a non-technical user use it? Until that alternative surfaces, people will continue to use it. I don't blame them.
- almostdeadguy 8mo ago
  This is like "I like lighting off fireworks at the gas station because its fun, do you have a "safe" alternative?".
  - Extropy_ 8mo ago
    That's a total mischaracterization. OP is saying there are no safer fireworks, so some damage will be done, but until someone develops safer and better fireworks, people will continue to use the existing ones
    - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
      Or we will ban OpenClaw, as many jurisdictions ban fireworks, and start filing CFAA cases against people whose moltbots misbehave. I'm not happy about that option, I remember Aaron Swartz, but it's not acceptable for an industry to declare that they provide a useful service so they're not going to self-regulate.
    - almostdeadguy 8mo ago
      My perspective is all AI needs to have way more legal controls around use and accountability, so I’m not particularly sympathetic to “rapidly growing new public ill is unsafe, but there’s no safer option”
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
dang 8mo ago
Recent and related, in reverse order (are there others?): 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 - Feb 2026 (80 comments) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205 comments) An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (620 comments) AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30 comments) The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments) An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (949 comments) AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (750 comments)
theahura 8mo ago
Author here -- wanted to briefly summarize the article, since many comments seem to be about things that are not in the article. The article is not about the dangers of leaking credentials. It is about using tools like OpenClaw to automatically attack other people, or AI agents attacking other people even without explicit prompting to do so.
iamnothere 8mo ago
> First: bad people doing bad things. I think most people are good people most of the time. Most people know blackmail is bad. But there are some people who would blackmail all the time if it was simply easier to do. The reason they do not blackmail is because blackmail is hard and you’ll probably get caught. AI lowers the barrier to entry for being a terrible person. > Second: bad AI doing bad things. We do not yet know how to align AI to human values. Strange that the author doesn’t see the contradiction here. Harassment, hate, etc are human values. Common ones! Just, like, look around. Everyone has the option to choose otherwise, yet we often do not. (This is referred to as a “revealed preference.”) It may be that AI is such a powerful tool that it’s like giving your asshole neighbor a nuclear weapon. Or it may not be. If it’s more mundane, then it likely falls more in the category of knives, spy cameras, certain common chemicals, and AirTags: things that could (and sometimes will) be misused, but which have legitimate uses and are still typically legal in most parts of the world. Despite thinking most applications for AI are low value, I am firmly against restricting access to tools because of potential for misuse, unless an individual has shown themselves to be particularly dangerous. If you want an angle to contain potential damage, make a user responsible for what their AI does. That would be fair.
ianlpaterson 8mo ago
The security concerns here are real but solvable with the same discipline we apply to any privileged software. I run OpenClaw on Apple Silicon with local models (no cloud API dependency). The hardening checklist that actually matters: run the gateway in userspace, bind to loopback not 0.0.0.0, put it behind Tailscale or equivalent - and don't put sensitive data or let it access sensitive systems! Session bloat is the other real risk nobody talks about - vague task definitions cause infinite tool-call loops that eat your entire context window in hours, which could be expensive if you're paying per API call. The "dangerous" framing conflates two different problems: (1) users giving agents unrestricted access without understanding the blast radius, and (2) agents being deliberately weaponized. Problem 1 is an education gap. Problem 2 exists with or without OpenClaw.
clemenshelm 8mo ago
[dead]

83 points by theahura 8mo ago

If you substitute the word "corporation" for OpenClaw, you'll see many of these same problems have plagued us for decades. We've had artificial intelligence that makes critical decisions without specific human accountability for a long time, and we have yet to come up with a really effective way of dealing with them that isn't essentially closing the barn door after the horse has departed. The new LLM-driven AI just accelerates the issues that have been festering in society for many years, and scales them down to the level of individuals.

manofmanysmiles 8mo ago
Or "institution", or "legal system", or "government."
- vannevar 8mo ago
  To some extent, yes. Government in particular. Both of them "close the loop" in the sense that they are self-sustaining (corporations through revenue, governments through taxes). Some institutions can be self-sustaining, but many lack strong independent feedback loops. Legal systems are pretty much all dependent on a parent government, or very large corporate entities (think big multi-year contracts).
- QuantumGood 8mo ago
  Oligarchy (, Iron Law of)
peterldowns 8mo ago
you may enjoy reading Nick Land, he has written about very similar ideas, specifically the idea that corporations and even "capital" can be considered AI in many ways.
- logicprog 8mo ago
  I second this
- gom_jabbar 8mo ago
  For those who are interested, I'm researching Land's main thesis that capitalism is AI: https://retrochronic.com https://retrochronic.com
  - HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago
    Wasn't this already discovered by Bayes ? Also this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
- guyomes 8mo ago
  The flow of ideas goes both ways between AI and economy. Notably, the economist Friedrich Hayek [1] was a source of inspiration in the development of AI. He wrote in 1945 on the idea that the price mechanism serves to share and synchronise local and personal knowledge [2]. In 1952, he described the brain as a self-ordering classification system based on a network of connections [3]. This last work was cited as a source of inspiration by Frank Rosenblatt in his 1958 paper on the perceptron [4], one of the pioneering studies in machine learning. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ... [3]: https://archive.org/details/sensoryorderinqu00haye https://archive.org/details/sensoryorderinqu00haye [2]: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/cogs501/Rosenblatt1958.pdf https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/cogs501/Rosenblatt1958.pd...
ModernMech 8mo ago
Yup, I have always viewed corporations as a kind of artificial intelligences -- they certainly don't think and behave like human intelligences, at least not healthy well-adjusted humans. If corporations were humans I feel they would have a personality disorder like psychopathy, and I'm starting to feel the same way about AI.
btschaegg 8mo ago
I'll just… leave this here. https://youtu.be/RmIgJ64z6Y4?si=PYtN2xCrDZ79WlY7 https://youtu.be/RmIgJ64z6Y4?si=PYtN2xCrDZ79WlY7
cyberge99 8mo ago
A corporation is a very high barrier to entry. Well, it used to be, so the rate at which bad decisions could happen was tepid.

ForgotMyUUID 8mo ago

I was against LLMs. After reading this, changed my mind. Thanks for sharing such a great use-case ideas!

joe_mamba 8mo ago

but...but..the developer showed us how openclaw was fixing itself at his command from his phone while he was at the barbershop

m_ke 8mo ago

also i wasn't concerned about open chinese models till the latest iteration of agentic models. most open claw users have no idea how easy it is to add backdoors to these models and now they're getting free reign on your computer to do anything they want. the risks were minimal with last generation of chat models, but now that they do tool calling and long horizon execution with little to no supervision it's going to become a real problem

8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo ago
I went with an isolated Raspberry Pi and a separate chat account and network. The only remaining risk is the API keys, but easily isolated. Although I think having direct access on your primary PC may make it more useful, the potential risk is too much for my appetite.
- oxag3n 8mo ago
  The only remaining risk? Considering wide range of bad actors and their intent, stealing your API keys is the last thing I'd worry about. People ended up in prison for things done on their computers, usually by them.
  - 8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo ago
    Unless you're proposing never touching OpenClaw, how will you set it up to your satisfaction in terms of security? > stealing your API keys is the last thing I'd worry about I don't know, I very much prefer the API credits not being burned needlessly. Now that I think of it, is there ever a case where an Anthrophic account is banned due to the related API keys being misused?
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
  This is genuinely the only way to do it now in a way that will not virtually guarantee some new and exciting ways to subvert your system. I briefly toyed with an idea of giving agent a vm playground, but I scrapped it after a while. I gave mine an old ( by today's standards ) pentium box and small local model to draw from, but, in truth, the only thing it really does is limit the amount of damage it can cause. The underlying issue remains in place.

simonw 8mo ago

This piece is missing the most important reason OpenClaw is dangerous: LLMs are still inherently vulnerable to prompt injection / lethal trifecta attacks, and OpenClaw is being used by hundreds of thousands of people who do not understand the security consequences of giving an LLM-powered tool access to their private data, exposure to potentially untrusted instructions and the ability to run tools on their computers and potentially transmit copies of their data somewhere else.

amelius 8mo ago
Yeah, if a software engineer came up with such vulnerable idea, they would be fired instantly. Wait a second, LLMs are the product of software engineers.
- koakuma-chan 8mo ago
  Would they? I don't think anyone cares about security.
  - jstummbillig 8mo ago
    People have the grandest ideas about standards in software engineering since right about ai started dabbling in software engineering. It's uncanny.
  - tstrimple 8mo ago
    It seems like folks have forgotten again what the S in IOT stands for. This shit has been terrible for... well since always really.
- Legend2440 8mo ago
  This is just the price of being on the bleeding edge. Unfortunately, prompt injection does strongly limit what you can safely use LLMs for. But people are willing to accept the limitations because they do a lot of really awesome things that can't be done any other way. They will figure out a solution to prompt injection eventually, probably by training LLMs in a way that separates instructions and data.

llmslave 8mo ago

The wright brothers first plane was also dangerous

bogzz 8mo ago
Wow what an amazing analogy, you're absolutely right!
paojans 8mo ago
This is more titan submersible than first plane. It’s dumb, everyone knows it’s dumb, and people do it anyways. The unsolved root problem isn’t new but people just moved ahead. At least with the sub the guy had some skin in the game. Openclaw dev is making out like a bandit while saying “tee hee the readme says this isn’t safe”.
lambda 8mo ago
But we didn't have thousands of people suddenly flying in their planes a few months from their first flight. Now, the risks with OpenClaw are lower, you're not likely to die if something goes wrong, but still real. A lot of folks are going to have a lot of accounts hijacked, lose cryptocurrency and money from banks, etc.
SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago
The big difference is that we didn’t incentivize or coerce the entire global population to ride on it.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
advisedwang 8mo ago
And universally across the globe societies have decided that flying them requires: * Pilots to have a license and follow strict proceedure * Every plane to have a government registration which is clearly painted on the side * ATC to coordinate * Manufacturers to meet regulations * Accident review boards with the power to mandate changes to designs and procedures * Airlines to follow regulations Not to mention the cost barrier-to-entry resulting in fundamentally different calculation on how they are used.

nimbus-hn-test 8mo ago

[flagged]

phyalow 8mo ago
Ok bot.

selridge 8mo ago

Big “why would you hook a perfectly good computer up to the internet” ca 1993 energy. So it’s dangerous. Who gives a fuck? Don’t run it on your machine.

rw_panic0_0 8mo ago

sky is blue

BeetleB 8mo ago

I think the people critical of OpenClaw are not addressing the reason(s) people are trying to use it. While I don't particularly care for this bot's (Rathburn) goals, people are trying to use OpenClaw for all kinds of personal/productivity benefits. Have a bunch of smallish projects that you don't have time for? Go set up OpenClaw and just have the AI work on them for a week or two - sending you daily updates on progress. If you're the type who likes LLM coding because it now enables you to do lots of projects you've had in your mind for years, you're also likely the sort of person who'll like OpenClaw. Forget bots messing with Github and posting to social media. Yes, it's very dangerous. But do you have a "safe" alternative that one can set up quickly, and can have a non-technical user use it? Until that alternative surfaces, people will continue to use it. I don't blame them.

almostdeadguy 8mo ago
This is like "I like lighting off fireworks at the gas station because its fun, do you have a "safe" alternative?".
- Extropy_ 8mo ago
  That's a total mischaracterization. OP is saying there are no safer fireworks, so some damage will be done, but until someone develops safer and better fireworks, people will continue to use the existing ones
  - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    Or we will ban OpenClaw, as many jurisdictions ban fireworks, and start filing CFAA cases against people whose moltbots misbehave. I'm not happy about that option, I remember Aaron Swartz, but it's not acceptable for an industry to declare that they provide a useful service so they're not going to self-regulate.
  - almostdeadguy 8mo ago
    My perspective is all AI needs to have way more legal controls around use and accountability, so I’m not particularly sympathetic to “rapidly growing new public ill is unsafe, but there’s no safer option”

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

dang 8mo ago

Recent and related, in reverse order (are there others?): 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 - Feb 2026 (80 comments) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205 comments) An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (620 comments) AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30 comments) The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments) An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (949 comments) AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (750 comments)

theahura 8mo ago

Author here -- wanted to briefly summarize the article, since many comments seem to be about things that are not in the article. The article is not about the dangers of leaking credentials. It is about using tools like OpenClaw to automatically attack other people, or AI agents attacking other people even without explicit prompting to do so.

iamnothere 8mo ago

> First: bad people doing bad things. I think most people are good people most of the time. Most people know blackmail is bad. But there are some people who would blackmail all the time if it was simply easier to do. The reason they do not blackmail is because blackmail is hard and you’ll probably get caught. AI lowers the barrier to entry for being a terrible person. > Second: bad AI doing bad things. We do not yet know how to align AI to human values. Strange that the author doesn’t see the contradiction here. Harassment, hate, etc are human values. Common ones! Just, like, look around. Everyone has the option to choose otherwise, yet we often do not. (This is referred to as a “revealed preference.”) It may be that AI is such a powerful tool that it’s like giving your asshole neighbor a nuclear weapon. Or it may not be. If it’s more mundane, then it likely falls more in the category of knives, spy cameras, certain common chemicals, and AirTags: things that could (and sometimes will) be misused, but which have legitimate uses and are still typically legal in most parts of the world. Despite thinking most applications for AI are low value, I am firmly against restricting access to tools because of potential for misuse, unless an individual has shown themselves to be particularly dangerous. If you want an angle to contain potential damage, make a user responsible for what their AI does. That would be fair.

ianlpaterson 8mo ago

The security concerns here are real but solvable with the same discipline we apply to any privileged software. I run OpenClaw on Apple Silicon with local models (no cloud API dependency). The hardening checklist that actually matters: run the gateway in userspace, bind to loopback not 0.0.0.0, put it behind Tailscale or equivalent - and don't put sensitive data or let it access sensitive systems! Session bloat is the other real risk nobody talks about - vague task definitions cause infinite tool-call loops that eat your entire context window in hours, which could be expensive if you're paying per API call. The "dangerous" framing conflates two different problems: (1) users giving agents unrestricted access without understanding the blast radius, and (2) agents being deliberately weaponized. Problem 1 is an education gap. Problem 2 exists with or without OpenClaw.

clemenshelm 8mo ago

[dead]