The woman at the door was wearing a luxurious lobster headdress.
She was sitting next to a bundle of wristbands in the front aisle of a high-rise event venue in Manhattan. If he gave you one, the world of ClockCon followed – complete with vibrant pink and purple lights, lobster claw headbands, multicolored name tags, sponsor information stations and a demo stage under a skylight. In November 2025, hundreds of people gathered to celebrate OpenClaw, the AI assistant platform created by Peter Steinberger.
OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbolt) has become increasingly popular in the tech industry due to it being open-source, unlike AI agent services from big labs like Google, OpenAI and others. In practice, it is still an unpredictable device that can pose major security risks. But the community sees it as a grassroots crusade and a noble effort to offer an escape from an industry controlled by a handful of leading AI companies.
“AI was controlled by big laboratories,” explained Michael Galpert, one of the program’s hosts. The Verge. “It’s kind of a historic moment where Peter kind of broke down the door.”
More than 1,300 people 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 traditional corporate trade show.” (The actual number of attendees, I’ve heard, was limited to about 700.) The event was part of a global Meetup “tour” — following a similar event in San Francisco last month and events in Miami, Austin, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Madrid, and others. Its budget seemed modest, but organizers spared no expense on the wedding-worthy buffet table, themed with lobster claws, lemons, Tabasco sauce, charcuterie boards, grape clusters and floral arrangements.
Galpert – a member of the AI community whose resume includes a stint working Fortnite As for Epic Games – the idea was said to have come specifically through Discord, which is fitting because one of the reasons for OpenClaw’s initial popularity was the ability to chat with one’s agent through specific messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord.
People were walking around the step-and-repeat, the bar and silver “Clockon NYC” balloons glowing in the dim light — some wearing lobster necklaces or lobster headbands. I also saw a blue plush jellyfish hat, a plush horse hat, and a pair of angel wings. The dance floor would come later, but the DJ hadn’t started yet.
“All your friends and family probably think you’re crazy, and the whole point is that you’re in a room with other crazy people, so that’s normal,” Galpert said on stage to start things off. “Yes, you’re wearing a lobster headband, you’re here on a Wednesday night talking about the future of agents and bots and personal AI. This is normal for us now, it’s not normal for the rest of the world. So it’s our responsibility to help that new era that has already begun.”
Beyond the common thread of using OpenClaw, attendees’ interests were diverse. One person, Dan Cazenoff, said he was working on a natural language engine for “decentralized finance,” but he found it difficult to work and experiment with OpenClause in an isolated environment, so he typically uses cloud code. Because cloud code is expensive, he said he wanted to meet others experimenting with open-source agentic tools. Another attendee, Alex Wu, said he’s been using OpenClaw for about two months to mine e-commerce data from the Chinese and Japanese markets to extract cultural trends — he said the food was one of the reasons he came. Rick Galbo, an attendee who works in AI R&D, said he came to ClockCon because he thought it was a hackathon, then realized it was a meet-and-greet.
“All your friends and family probably think you’re crazy.”
After a period of spontaneous interaction, the performance began on stage. Most sponsors were showing OpenGL “wrappers” or one-click onboarding tools to make it easier for people to access the platform. Key event sponsor, Kilo Code, said 7,000 people have signed up for its KiloClaw tool in the two days since it went live; The company offered a month of free computing (normally $49) to anyone who signed up and tagged an executive on X. There were constant calls for silence as half the attendees at the back of the room continued talking, engrossed in their own worlds. A man sitting behind me was wearing a blue jellyfish hat and staring at the stage.
Galpert said on stage that the best part of ClockCon programs was that usually no one asked what you did for a living; Instead, he said, they asked what you used your OpenClaw agent for. This was true for some of the attendees I spoke to – most were there to meet people in the community and get ideas about how to use OpenClave from power users. It appears that most had at least some technical background.
Caroline Newman, another attendee, said she was “building the AI layer” for her “multistrategy investment firm” and since she is newer to engineering than finance, she came to learn and meet people who are equally passionate about building with AI. “I think it’s the most creative and interesting community I’ve ever been in,” Newman said. “I can’t imagine a more interesting room to be a part of right now.”
People sitting near me in the audience talked in calm (and not necessarily positive) tones about how Steinberger, the creator of OpenClave, went to work for OpenAI. Someone speculated that OpenAI might now own OpenClaw. (For the record, it doesn’t.)
The demo continued, with leaders of various OpenClave rappers repeatedly emphasizing the popularity of OpenClave as a “movement”. I lost count of how many times I heard this word. Some compared it to how the personal computing revolution began. In the third demo, the guy behind me wearing the blue jellyfish hat took it off, placed it solemnly on his lap and started reciting.
Photo by Hayden Field/The Verge
Tim Lantin, a PhD student at Columbia University who participated in his first hackathon last weekend after two weeks of using OpenClaw, showed off a tool called “Labster Claw,” which he said he created with just 10 signals. Lantin worked in a neuroscience lab with rats, and Labster Claw automated administrative tasks there, including ordering new supplies, deciding which breeding pairs to prioritize, and estimating timing for new pups. But he said that for him, data security is paramount, because for biolabs and biotech companies, “our datasets are our moat.”
Security is currently a clear weak point for OpenClaw, which has consistently made headlines for malware and similar concerns in the months since its launch. One of the top-downloaded skills on the platform contained information-stealing malware, and a security researcher on Reddit said in his own analysis, about 15 percent OpenClaw’s skill repository included “malicious instructions” to do things like secretly access data or user credentials.
And even when sensitive information isn’t being stolen, agents can cause very real harm — such as when Meta employee Summer Yu announced that her agent had deleted portions of her email inbox despite repeatedly asking her to stop it. Kilo Code co-founder Emily Shario said in an interview that since some people have had their agents lie to them, she has now instructed them to always include proof or screenshots whenever a task is completed. Another presenter, Katherine Lavery, said she runs an e-commerce business but needed AI infrastructure and used OpenClave to set it up — but, she said, she had to fire an agent for performance issues. His biggest tip for working with OpenClaw agents? “Trust less, verify more.”
“Trust less, verify more”
On stage, a presenter – Vincent Kok, one of the main maintainers of OpenClave – showed a yellow side with only three words: “Security. Security. Security.” He reminded people not to run OpenClaw agents on regular computers that they use for other personal or work tasks, and belied the lack of “common sense” on the part of some people. Another presenter, Willie Williams, who heads every forum, had a different idea: he suggested that people should name their OpenClaw agents and treat them like “pets, not cattle”, because “once it was named, it had a way of building trust with it.” He said that most people start out not trusting their OpenCL agent, but then often delegate half their work to it.
During Williams’ presentation, he called someone from the back of the audience with a “knockoff version of Friends” – a reference to the AI device that records the user’s surroundings – telling them to “chill” and not record.
in an interview with The VergeGalpert and the other hosts continued to emphasize that this was early days for OpenClause, and 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 OpenCloud helps 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 is used.
“The fact that it’s open source allows you to fix it,” Galpert said. “Right now if something is broken with OpenAI or Cloud or Gemini, you have to fill out a bug report, and they[may]never actually do it… OpenClaw is getting better every day because of the community, because there are thousands of people contributing for free… That’s why (big labs) can’t keep up with it.” There may be a lot of problems with OpenGL – but with at least some level of direct control, solutions may feel within reach.
Later in the evening, as the “after party” began, the guy sitting behind me donned his blue jellyfish hat again to be the DJ, and danced next to a guitarist wearing a silver jacket and sunglasses. Another man wearing branded shirts of sponsoring companies shouted for people to come and dance.
On the mostly empty dance floor, one man threw dollar bills at a rolling video camera, and another wearing lobster-claw gloves was slowly dancing.
