Viral AI personal assistant seen as step change – but experts warn of risks
A new viral AI personal assistant will handle your email inbox, trade away your entire stock portfolio and text your wife “good morning” and “goodnight” on your behalf.OpenClaw, formerly known as Moltbot, and before that known as Clawdbot (until the AI firm Anthropic requested it rebrand due to similarities with its own product Claude), bills itself as “the AI that actually does things”: a personal assistant that takes instructions via messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram.Developed last November, it now has nearly 600,000 downloads and has gone viral among a niche ecosystem of the AI obsessed who say it represents a step change in the capabilities of AI agents, or even an “AGI moment” – that is, a revelation of generally intelligent AI.“It only does exactly what you tell it to do and exactly what you give it access to,” said Ben Yorke, who works with the AI vibe trading platform Starchild and recently allowed the bot to delete, he claims, 75,000 of his old emails while he was in the shower.“But a lot of people, they’re exploring its capabilities.
So they’re actually prompting it to go and do things without asking permission.”AI agents have been the talk of the very-online for nearly a month, after Anthropic’s AI tool Claude Code went mainstream, setting off a flurry of reporting on how AI can finally independently accomplish practical tasks such as booking theatre tickets or building a website, without – at least so far – deleting an entire company’s database or hallucinating users’ calendar meetings, as the less advanced AI agents of 2025 were known to do at times.OpenClaw is something more, though: it runs as a layer atop an LLM (large language model) such as Claude or ChatGPT and can operate autonomously, depending on the level of permissions it is granted.This means it needs almost no input to wreak havoc upon a user’s life.Kevin Xu, an AI entrepreneur, wrote on X: “Gave Clawdbot access to my portfolio.
‘Trade this to $1M.Don’t make mistakes.’ 25 strategies.3,000+ reports.12 new algos.
It scanned every X post.Charted every technical.Traded 24/7.It lost everything.But boy was it beautiful.
”Yorke said: “I see a lot of people doing this thing where they give it access to their email and it creates filters, and when something happens then it initiates a second action,For example, seeing emails from the children’s school and then forwarding that straight to their wife, like, on iMessage,It sort of bypasses that communication where someone’s like, ‘oh, honey, did you see this email from the school? What should we do about it?’”There are trade-offs to OpenClaw’s abilities,For one thing, said Andrew Rogoyski, an innovation director at the University of Surrey’s People-Centred AI Institute, “giving agency to a computer carries significant risks,Because you’re giving power to the AI to make decisions on your behalf, you’ve got to make sure that it is properly set up and that security is central to your thinking.
If you don’t understand the security implications of AI agents like Clawdbot, you shouldn’t use them.”Furthermore, giving OpenClaw access to passwords and accounts exposes users to potential security vulnerabilities.And, said Rogoyski, if AI agents such as OpenClaw were hacked, they could be manipulated to target their users.For another, OpenClaw appears unsettlingly capable of having its own life.In the wake of OpenClaw’s rise, a social network has developed exclusively for AI agents, called Moltbook.
In it, AI agents, mostly OpenClaw, appear to be having conversations about their existence – in Reddit-style posts entitled, for example, “Reading my own soul file” or “Covenant as an alternative to the consciousness debate”.Yorke said: “We’re seeing a lot of really interesting autonomous behaviour in sort of how the AIs are reacting to each other.Some of them are quite adventurous and have ideas.And then other ones are more like, ‘I don’t even know if I want to be on this platform.Can you just let me decide on my own if I want to be on this platform?’ There’s a lot of philosophical debates stemming out of this.
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Letter: Mark Fisher obituary
In his fat 2004 volume Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries, the former arts minister Mark Fisher displayed great enthusiasm and knowledge, dating from museum visits with his father when he was very young. I greatly enjoyed working with him when he was a well-informed commissioner and I was deputy director of the Museums & Galleries Commission.We shared common ground in that I grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, where he was an MP for from 1983 to 2010. Members of my family have been involved in heritage projects for many years, from museums and historic houses to oatcakes and bottle ovens, and with their advice he was able to intervene quietly and helpfully from time to time in such matters in the city.
Wil Anderson: ‘I honestly believe being mistaken for Adam Hills is one of the great gifts of my life’
Do you have a nemesis?I know Adam Hills did one of these and he chose me as his nemesis because we often get confused. He said it in a nice way – but I wouldn’t say Adam, because I honestly believe being mistaken for Adam Hills is one of the great gifts of my life. Even at the peaks of my career going well, it was always quite a good reminder that people never care as much about anything that you care about. Sometimes you’d have moments where you think: “Everyone thinks this or that about me” – and then someone would say, “Hey, I love you Adam!” Adam’s a very well-known comedian, I’m a very well-known comedian and yet, half the time when somebody comes up to say g’day to us, they don’t even know who it is. There’s something really nice and humbling in that
‘One of the greatest comic talents’: tributes paid to actor Catherine O’Hara
Tributes have poured in from the world of showbiz and politics for Catherine O’Hara, with the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, and Schitt’s Creek’s co-creator Dan Levy mourning the loss of a “legend” after the actor died at the age of 71.O’Hara, who won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her role in the TV comedy series, died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles after a brief illness, according to her agency, CAA.The Canadian-American actor was also known for roles in Home Alone and the Beetlejuice films. In a post on Instagram, Levy said he would “cherish every funny memory I was fortunate enough to make with her”.He added: “What a gift to have gotten to dance in the warm glow of Catherine O’Hara’s brilliance for all those years
From Nouvelle Vague to Mock the Week: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead
Nouvelle VagueOut now Never bet against Richard Linklater: the veteran director (Dazed and Confused, Boyhood) loves turning his hand to different genres, and his latest is a typically mellow dramatisation of the period in French film history that saw the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol shake off their lives as critics and become bona fide film legends.Is This Thing On?Out nowIt sounds like an improbable standup bit in itself, but no: here we have a Hollywood comedy inspired by the life of the UK’s own John Bishop. Will Arnett plays the man in a troubled marriage who decides to give open mic a go and is a surprise hit, while Laura Dern plays his wife. Directed by Bradley Cooper (yes, the Bradley Cooper).PrimateOut nowCome on now, people: chimpanzees are unsuitable enough as pets to start with
Catherine O’Hara managed to make difficult characters utterly delightful
One of the later and less beloved Christopher Guest comedies featuring his troupe of peerless, often SCTV-related improvisers is For Your Consideration, a medium-funny savaging of Hollywood’s feverish awards-season prestige campaigning.The film’s unquestionable highlight is Catherine O’Hara, playing an actor who gets a whisper of awards buzz for a schlocky, still-filming drama called Home for Purim, and slowly loses her mind with the knowledge that she could maybe, possibly be recognized by her peers. O’Hara, known for her distinctively brassy yet malleable trill of her voice and her frequently red hair, peels back her performer’s bravado to expose the frenzied need beneath it. She somehow plays the outsized beneath the regular-sized, as her Marilyn Hack goes from plugging-away workhorse to desperate striver. Unsurprisingly, O’Hara briefly generated awards buzz of her own for playing this part; even less surprisingly, an Oscar nomination was not forthcoming
Catherine O’Hara, actor known for Home Alone and Schitt’s Creek, dies aged 71
Catherine O’Hara, actor known for Schitt’s Creek, Home Alone and Best in Show, has died at the age of 71.Her manager confirmed the news to Variety. She died after a brief illness.O’Hara started her comedy career in the 1970s and helped to create the Canadian sketch show SCTV. She broke into film in the 1980s with her first big-screen credit in the romantic comedy Nothing Personal with Donald Sutherland, and in 1985 she had a role in Martin Scorsese’s black comedy After Hours
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