AI Agents Are Here. OpenClaw Is Leading the Charge.

OpenClaw hit 145,000 GitHub stars in about 60 days. Fortune wrote about it. Wired wrote about it. CrowdStrike, Sophos, and Cisco put out security advisories. The Belgian government issued a warning. TikTok is full of demos. There's some hype - and some fury.

If you haven't looked at it yet - it's an open-source AI agent. Not a chatbot. An agent. It runs on a server, connects to your chat apps (WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, whatever you use), and does things on your behalf. Browses the web, manages your calendar, sends emails, controls smart home devices, runs code. You message it and it acts. 24/7, even when your phone is off.

The security situation

Bottom line: It's not good.

OpenClaw is powerful because it has broad access to your stuff - that's the whole point. But an AI that can send emails, browse the web, and execute code has an obvious attack surface.

Archestra.AI's CEO demonstrated extracting a private key from a running instance - sent it an email with a hidden prompt injection, the AI read it, followed the embedded instructions, and leaked the key. On camera. Not theoretical.

SecurityScorecard found 135,000+ exposed OpenClaw instances on the public internet. 63% running vulnerable configs. 12,812 exploitable via RCE right now. There's a critical CVE in the wild (CVE-2026-25253, CVSS 8.8) - attacker sends a link, hijacks your WebSocket auth token, gets shell access. Public exploit code exists. Patched in v2026.1.29 but most self-hosted instances haven't updated.

Prompt injection is an unsolved problem across the entire industry - not just OpenClaw. Anyone telling you they've made agentic AI "safe" is either confused or lying.

So why is everyone using it

Because it works. There's a TikTok that went viral showing someone's instance clearing 4,000 unread emails overnight. People are managing calendars through WhatsApp, controlling smart homes through Telegram, getting research summaries delivered as messages. The reason it has 145K stars isn't hype - people set it up and go "oh, this is actually useful."

This is what "AI that does things" (vs. "AI that talks") actually looks like. Not a chatbot on a website - a background process with access to your accounts that handles stuff you'd otherwise do yourself. The nature of how people use the internet is changing. This is part of that change.

Self-hosting is harder than it looks

Linux server, Docker, Node.js, SSL certs, reverse proxy, firewall rules - and then you maintain it forever. Most people give up in 10 minutes. The ones who get it running inherit the security burden above - staying on top of CVEs, checking if they're in that 135K exposed count, hardening configs they barely understand.

What we built

LobsterHelper runs OpenClaw for you. I want to be specific about what that means - and what it doesn't.

Each instance runs in its own Firecracker micro-VM - same isolation technology behind AWS Lambda. Not a container. Not a shared process. An actual VM with its own kernel, memory, and network stack. Storage is LUKS-encrypted with a key unique to your instance. Patches get applied, backups run automatically, monitoring is 24/7.

That's an infrastructure claim - not a safety claim. I'm not going to tell you OpenClaw is "safe." It's agentic AI that sends emails, runs code, and browses the web on your behalf. Prompt injection is inherent to the technology. We can't fix that. Neither can anyone else right now.

What we can do - your instance is isolated from everyone else's, your data is encrypted, your software is patched, and your backups exist when something goes wrong.

If you've been watching all of this unfold and you want to try it - the trial is free, you can cancel anytime, no lock-in.