OpenClaw 2.0 release

OpenClaw 2.0 (officially v2026.8.1) is described internally as the largest update in the project's history, merging over 16,000 pull requests from 933 contributors, including 569 first-time contributors ^[1]. Chief Architect Vincent Koc noted the release alone accounts for roughly half of every pull request merged into OpenClaw since the project began ^[2]. That scale followed an unusually quiet stretch: about seven weeks without a release, a sharp break from the project's prior cadence of 106 releases in 230 days ^[2].

The release's headline feature, shared cloud sessions, lets multiple people join a single agent session with shared context, enabling live task handoff rather than separate documentation ^[3]. The feature grew out of the team's own two-month effort to 'build OpenClaw with OpenClaw,' shifting internal development from individual local coding harnesses to a shared team agent ^[3]. Enterprise-focused coverage frames this as moving OpenClaw from an individual developer tool toward persistent, collaborative organizational infrastructure ^[3]. The rebuilt browser Control UI reinforces that shift, replacing the old separate Overview page with a central activity dashboard built around the live conversation ^[4].

OpenClaw 2.0 adds real security infrastructure: private credential requests that keep secret values out of chat and model context via masked prompts, a shared team-scoped credential store, and an optional 1Password broker for resolving secrets with per-secret approval and audit trails ^[5]. But independent security analysis argues the release prioritizes accessibility over safe defaults - sandboxing for contributor-controlled code remains off by default, and values in the new Secret Store aren't encrypted at rest, relying on filesystem permissions instead ^[6]. The same analysis stresses that the new shared cloud sessions are explicitly not a tenant-isolation or security boundary, a distinction organizations adopting multi-user sessions need to understand ^[6].

OpenClaw began in November 2025 as Clawdbot, creator Peter Steinberger's single-file, locally-run agent ^[7]. A trademark concern from Anthropic over the name's similarity to 'Claude' forced a rename to Moltbot in January 2026, alongside a rewrite from single script to modular plugin platform, before a second rename to OpenClaw days later after community pushback ^[7]. Steinberger joined OpenAI in February 2026, but OpenClaw continued as an independent open-source project under a foundation ^[8]- a structure that let this release ship at foundation scale (933 contributors) rather than depending on one person.

The release carries real breaking changes: the bundled OpenProse plugin and its /prose command were removed, and model references under codex/ and openai-codex/ must migrate to openai/* routes ^[5]. Sessions and transcripts also moved from file-backed storage to SQLite, meaning downgrades now require manually restoring archived legacy artifacts rather than a simple revert ^[1]. OpenClaw's own doctor --fix command is positioned as the catch-all remedy for stale configuration left behind by these changes ^[5]. Trade coverage already describes a mixed community reception to the upgrade path, with some reporting broken gateways, lost automations, or authentication problems ^[2].