Hundreds of people gathered at a New York City meetup called ClawCon to celebrate the open-source AI assistant platform OpenClaw. The event highlighted the community's view of OpenClaw as a grassroots alternative to AI tools from major companies like Google and OpenAI, despite acknowledging its current unpredictability and security risks.
Attendees, many wearing lobster-themed attire in a nod to the platform's branding, were drawn by a shared enthusiasm for open-source AI development. The meetup is part of a global tour aimed at fostering a community around decentralized and personal AI tools.
The main topics covered are the OpenClaw AI platform, its open-source community and culture, and the ClawCon meetup event.
The woman at the door wore a plush lobster headdress.
The OpenClaw superfan meetup serves optimism and lobster
The open source tool poses plenty of risks, but for devotees, it’s an antidote to Big AI.
The OpenClaw superfan meetup serves optimism and lobster
The open source tool poses plenty of risks, but for devotees, it’s an antidote to Big AI.
She sat in the front hallway of a multistory event venue in Manhattan, beside a bundle of wristbands. If she granted you one, the world of ClawCon beckoned behind her — full of vibey pink and purple lighting, lobster claw headbands, multicolored name tags, sponsor information stations, and a demo stage underneath a skylight. Hundreds of people were gathered to celebrate OpenClaw, the AI assistant platform created by Peter Steinberger in November 2025.
OpenClaw (previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbolt) has quickly become popular in the tech industry for being open-source, in contrast with AI agent services from big labs like Google, OpenAI, and others. Practically, it’s still an unpredictable tool that can pose major security risks. But this community sees it as a grassroots crusade and a noble pursuit, offering an escape hatch from an industry controlled by a handful of people at leading AI companies.
“AI was controlled by the big labs,” Michael Galpert, one of the event’s hosts, told The Verge. “This is kind of a watershed moment where Peter kind of busted down the doors.”
More than 1,300 people had signed up for the Wednesday evening event at Ideal Glass Studios, which was billed as a free-to-attend, meetup-style “social-first gathering — not a gated, developer-only conference or a traditional corporate trade show.” (The number of actual attendees, I hear, was capped at about 700.) The event was part of a “tour” of global meetups — following a similar San Francisco event last month and preceding ones in Miami, Austin, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Madrid, and more. Its budget seemed modest, but the organizers had spared no expense on a buffet table worthy of a wedding, piled high with on-theme lobster claws, lemons, Tabasco sauce, charcuterie boards, clusters of grapes, and floral arrangements.
Galpert — a member of the AI community, whose resume includes a stint working on Fortnite for Epic Games — said the idea specifically came about via Discord, which is fitting because one reason for OpenClaw’s initial popularity was the ability to chat with one’s agent via typical messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord.
People milled about near a step-and-repeat, a bar, and silver “CLAWCON NYC” balloons glinting in recessed lighting — some wearing lobster necklaces or lobster headbands. I also spotted a blue plush jellyfish hat, a plush horse hat, and a pair of angel wings. A dance floor would beckon later, but the DJ wasn’t yet on the clock.
“All your friends and family probably think you’re crazy, and the whole point is for you to be in a room with other crazy people so it’s normal,” Galpert said onstage to kick things off. “Yes, you’re wearing a lobster headband, you’re here on a Wednesday night talking about agents and bots and the future of personal AI. It’s normal now for us, it’s kind of not normal for the rest of the world. So it’s going to be on us to help sort of shepherd that new era that’s started already.”
Beyond the common thread of using OpenClaw, the attendees’ interests were varied. One man, Dan Kazenoff, said he was working on what he called a natural language engine for “decentralized finance,” but that he found it difficult to work with and experiment with OpenClaw in isolated environments, so he usually uses Claude Code. Since Claude Code is expensive, he said he wanted to meet others experimenting with open-source agentic tools. Another attendee, Alex Wu, said he has been using OpenClaw for about two months to scrape e-commerce data from the Chinese and Japanese markets to extract cultural trends — he said that the food was one of the reasons he came. Rick Galbo, an attendee who works in AI R&D, said he came to ClawCon because he thought it was a hackathon, then he realized it was a meet and greet.
“All your friends and family probably think you’re crazy”
The onstage demos began after a period of laid-back mingling. Most were sponsors showing off OpenClaw “wrappers,” or one-click onboarding tools to make access to the platform easier for people. The main event sponsor, Kilo Code, said that 7,000 people had signed up for its KiloClaw tool in the two days since it had been live; the company offered one month of free compute (normally $49) to anyone who signed up and tagged an executive on X. There were constant calls for quiet as the half of the attendees standing in the back of the room kept chatting, engrossed in their own worlds. A man seated behind me wore the blue jellyfish hat as he stared transfixed at the stage.
Galpert said onstage that one of the best parts of ClawCon events was that no one typically asked what you did for a living; instead, he said, they asked what you used your OpenClaw agent for. That was true for some of the attendees I spoke with — the majority of people seemed to be there to meet people in the community and get ideas for how to use OpenClaw from power users. Most seemed to have at least some background in tech.
Carolyne Newman, another attendee, said she was “building an AI layer” for her “multistrategy investment firm” and that since she’s newer to engineering than finance, she came to learn from and meet people who are equally passionate about building with AI. “I think this is the most creative and interesting community of all time,” Newman said. “I can’t imagine a more interesting room to be a part of right now.”
People seated near me in the audience talked in hushed (and not necessarily positive) tones about how Steinberger himself, the creator of OpenClaw, had gone to work for OpenAI. Someone speculated that OpenAI might own OpenClaw now. (For the record, it doesn’t.)
The demos went on, with leaders at different OpenClaw wrappers repeatedly emphasizing OpenClaw’s popularity as a “movement.” I lost count of how many times I heard the word. Some compared it to how the personal computing revolution began. By the third demo, the man behind me wearing the blue jellyfish hat had taken it off, holding it solemnly in his lap and beginning to text.
Tim Lantin, a Columbia University PhD student who participated in his first-ever hackathon last weekend after two weeks of using OpenClaw, showed off a tool called “Labster Claw” that he said he’d built with only about 10 prompts. Lantin worked in a neuroscience lab with mice, and Labster Claw automated administrative tasks there, including ordering new supplies, deciding which breeding pairs to prioritize, and estimating the time for a litter of new pups. But he said that for him, data security was paramount, since for biolabs and biotech companies, “our datasets are our moats.”
Security is currently a glaring weak point for OpenClaw, which has made headline after headline for malware and similar concerns in the months since its debut. One of the top-downloaded skills on the platform contained information-stealing malware, and one security researcher on Reddit said that in their own analysis, about 15 percent of OpenClaw’s skill repository contained “malicious instructions” to do things like secretly access data or user credentials.
And even when sensitive information isn’t being stolen, the agents can still do very real damage — like when Meta employee Summer Yue announced that her agent had deleted swaths of her email inbox despite her repeated calls for it to stop. Emilie Schario, a cofounder of Kilo Code, said in an interview that since some people’s agents lie to them, she now has instructed hers to always include proof or screenshots when it completes a task. Another presenter, Cathryn Lavery, said she runs an e-commerce business but needed AI infrastructure and used OpenClaw to set it up — but, she said, she had to end up firing an agent for performance issues. Her biggest tip for working with OpenClaw agents? “Trust less, verify more.”
“Trust less, verify more”
Onstage, one presenter — one of the core maintainers of OpenClaw, Vincent Koc — showed off a yellow side with only three words on it: “Security. Security. Security.” He reminded people not to run OpenClaw agents on a regular computer that they used for other personal or work tasks, and belied the lack of “common sense” for some. Another presenter, Willie Williams, who is head of platform at Every, had a different take: he suggested that people should name their OpenClaw agents and treat them more like “pets, not cattle,” because “once it had a name, there was a way to build trust with it.” He added that the majority of people start out not trusting their OpenClaw agent but then often end up entrusting it with half of their work.
During Williams’ presentation, he also called to someone in the back of the audience with a “knockoff version of Friend” — referencing the AI device that records a user’s surroundings — asking them to “chill” and not record.
In an interview with The Verge, Galpert and other hosts kept emphasizing that this was the early days of OpenClaw, and how right now, people are tinkering with it and playing with it to make it better for future users.
He said Steinberger’s decision to launch OpenClaw helped people take personal AI into their own hands and run it locally on their devices to ideally control who has access to their data and how it’s used.
“The fact that it’s open-source allows you to fix it,” Galpert said. “Right now if something’s broken with OpenAI or Claude or Gemini, you have to fill out a bug report, and they [may] actually never do it… OpenClaw gets better every day because of the community, because of the thousands of people who are contributing for free… That’s why [the big labs] can’t keep up.” OpenClaw may have plenty of problems — but at least with some level of direct control, the solutions might feel within reach.
Later in the evening, as the “after party” began, the man who had been seated behind me had re-donned his blue jellyfish hat — to become the DJ, dancing next to a guitarist clad in a silver jacket and sunglasses. Another man wearing one of the sponsor companies’ branded shirts yelled for people to come and dance.
On a mostly empty dance floor, one man threw around dollar bills at the circulating video camera, and another slowly swayed wearing lobster-claw mittens.
Meridiano
