On the same day that Peter Steinberger’s inspiring OpenClaw origin story played to a TED audience, he was telling a very different story to engineers at AIE. The contrast between those two rooms captures something important about where the fastest-growing open-source agent framework actually stands in 2026. To the public: a breakthrough technology, the highs of building something used by millions. To the engineers: 60x more security incident reports than curl. At least 20% of ClawHub skill contributions identified as malicious. 18,000+ exposed instances found in external scans. ...

Your OpenClaw agent can already write emails, manage your calendar, search the web, and run code. As of April 18, 2026, it can also make phone calls. Ring-a-Ding is a new OpenClaw skill that provisions a real U.S. phone number and routes outbound calls through OpenAI’s Realtime API — transcribing, summarizing, and feeding results back into your agent’s context. This guide walks you through the complete setup in under 15 minutes. ...

There’s a gap that every power user of OpenClaw eventually bumps into: the real world still runs on phone calls. Booking a dentist appointment, getting a contractor quote, checking whether a parts supplier has what you need — these are tasks your AI agent can reason about perfectly but couldn’t do until today. Ring-a-Ding launched on April 18, 2026 as a dedicated OpenClaw skill that hands your agent a real U.S. phone number and the ability to make outbound calls — no SIP infrastructure, no Twilio account, no telephony expertise required. ...

On April 18, 2026, Peter Steinberger walked onto the TED stage in Vancouver and said something that would land differently depending on where you sit in the AI world: “The lobster is loose, and it’s not going back.” For the uninitiated, OpenClaw — the AI agent framework Steinberger built that has accumulated over 247,000 GitHub stars and fundamentally shifted how developers think about personal AI — uses a lobster claw as its logo. The metaphor ran deeper than branding in his talk, titled “How I created OpenClaw, the breakthrough AI agent.” ...

Alibaba just handed the open-source AI community something remarkable: a model that scores 73.4% on SWE-bench Verified — one of the most demanding real-world software engineering benchmarks — while activating only 3 billion parameters per token during inference. Meet Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, released April 17 under the Apache 2.0 license. The Architecture: Sparse MoE Done Right Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with 35 billion total parameters, but that number is almost misleading for practical purposes. At inference time, the model activates only 3 billion parameters per token — roughly the compute footprint of a much smaller model, with the knowledge capacity of something far larger. ...

Alibaba’s Qwen3.6-35B-A3B scores 73.4% on SWE-bench Verified and runs on a single 24GB VRAM consumer GPU. Here’s how to get it running locally in under 30 minutes for agentic coding workflows. What You Need Hardware minimum: GPU with 24GB VRAM (RTX 4090, RTX 3090, RTX 6000 Ada, A5000, or equivalent) 32GB system RAM recommended ~25GB free disk space for model weights Software: Linux (recommended) or Windows with WSL2 CUDA 12.1+ drivers installed One of: Ollama, LM Studio, or Python + llama.cpp/vLLM Option 1: Ollama (Fastest Start) Ollama is the easiest path to a running local model with a compatible API. ...

AI agents can now charge purchases to your real Mastercard — no new wallet, no new card, no manual approval for each transaction. As of April 16, Lobster.cash (the agentic payments product by Crossmint) and Mastercard officially partnered to bring Agent Pay to the OpenClaw platform, making OpenClaw the first platform in scope for the integration with over one million active agents in deployment. What the Integration Actually Does Here’s the concrete capability: an OpenClaw agent assigned to book travel, purchase API credits, procure SaaS tools, or execute any other commerce task can now use a consumer’s existing Mastercard to complete those transactions — without the user having to review each individual purchase. ...

The White House and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat down on April 17 for what both sides called a “productive and constructive” meeting — the first official dialogue since a significant rift opened between the Pentagon and the AI safety startup earlier this year. The subject at the center of the table: Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s most capable and most restricted frontier model. What Actually Happened Senior officials including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Amodei to discuss how the U.S. government and Anthropic might collaborate on AI safety and cybersecurity without repeating the trust breakdown that characterized the earlier Pentagon dispute. ...

Anthropic just blew open the design process. On April 17, 2026, the company launched Claude Design — a new product under Anthropic Labs that lets anyone describe what they need visually and watch Claude build it. Prototypes. Pitch decks. Marketing assets. Interactive mockups. All through conversation. This is the kind of product that makes designers rethink their workflow and makes everyone else realize they no longer need to apologize for not being a designer. ...

Claude Design launched today in research preview, and if you’re a Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise subscriber, you can start using it right now at claude.ai/design. This guide walks you through going from a rough idea to either an interactive product prototype or a complete pitch deck — in under 30 minutes. Before You Start: Access and Prerequisites Claude Design is available to: Claude Pro subscribers ($20/month) Claude Max subscribers ($100+/month) Team plan accounts Enterprise accounts You do not need design experience. That’s the point. ...