The latest wave of AI excitement has brought us an unexpected mascot: a lobster. Clawdbot, a personal AI assistant, went viral within weeks of its launch and will keep its crustacean theme despite having had to change its name to Moltbot after a legal challenge from Anthropic. But before you jump on the bandwagon, here’s what you need to know.
According to its tagline, Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) is the “AI that actually does things” — whether it’s managing your calendar, sending messages through your favorite apps, or checking you in for flights. This promise has drawn thousands of users willing to tackle the technical setup required, even though it started as a scrappy personal project built by one developer for his own use.
That man is Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer and founder who is known online as @steipete and actively blogs about his work. After stepping away from his previous project, PSPDFkit, Steinberger felt empty and barely touched his computer for three years, he explained on his blog. But he eventually found his spark again — which led to Moltbot.
While Moltbot is now much more than a solo project, the publicly available version still derives from Clawd, “Peter’s crusted assistant,” now called Molty, a tool he built to help him “manage his digital life” and “explore what human-AI collaboration can be.”
For Steinberger, this meant diving deeper into the momentum around AI that had reignited his builder spark. A self-confessed “Claudoholic”, he initially named his project after Anthropic’s AI flagship product, Claude. He revealed on X that Anthropic subsequently forced him to change the branding for copyright reasons. TechCrunch has reached out to Anthropic for comment. But the project’s “lobster soul” remains unchanged.
To its early adopters, Moltbot represents the vanguard of how helpful AI assistants could be. Those who were already excited at the prospect of using AI to quickly generate websites and apps are even more keen to have their personal AI assistant perform tasks for them. And just like Steinberger, they’re eager to tinker with it.
This explains how Moltbot amassed more than 44,200 stars on GitHub so quickly. So much viral attention has been paid Moltbot that it has even moved markets. Cloudfl …