OpenClaw went viral. Meet the maintainers building and securing it.

OpenClaw, a personal AI assistant launched by Peter Steinberger in November 2025, rapidly became a major open source project, reaching roughly 388,000 GitHub stars, 81,000 forks, and 80,000 commits by August 2026. Its maintainers describe how AI-generated contributions transformed pull requests into a high-volume stream requiring new review practices, including evaluating agent transcripts, tests, screenshots, and contributors’ understanding rather than relying on contribution counts alone. While the project seeks to remain accessible to first-time and nontraditional contributors, maintainers increasingly use AI tools to review submissions and directly refine promising code. The discussion also highlights security concerns, including manipulated reputation signals, tradeoffs between convenient and secure defaults, and software supply chain risks that prompted closer scrutiny of dependencies and stronger relationships with their maintainers. Participation in GitHub’s Secure Open Source Fund gave the team security guidance and a peer network of maintainers facing similar challenges as they work to sustain an unusually fast-growing project.

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