OpenClaw shipped version 2026.4.1 today, and it’s a substantial release — over 40 pull requests merged, a handful of significant feature additions, and a simultaneous ClawHub China mirror announcement that signals continued international expansion.
Here’s what’s actually in the release, drawn directly from the changelog.
AWS Bedrock Guardrails Support
The biggest enterprise story in this release is native AWS Bedrock Guardrails integration in the bundled provider. This lets teams using OpenClaw on AWS infrastructure apply Bedrock’s policy enforcement layer — content filters, topic deny lists, PII redaction, and grounding checks — directly to model calls routed through the Bedrock provider.
For enterprise teams that are already running Bedrock as their model execution layer, this closes a gap: guardrails that were previously configured at the application layer can now be enforced at the provider level inside OpenClaw. Contributed by @MikeORed.
Per-Job Cron Tool Allowlists
The openclaw cron command gains a --tools flag in this release, enabling per-job tool allowlists. This is a meaningful security improvement for teams running automated pipeline cron jobs.
Previously, a cron-scheduled agent inherited the full tool set of the agent configuration it ran under. With --tools, you can specify exactly which tools a scheduled job is permitted to call — dramatically reducing the blast radius if a cron job is ever manipulated or behaves unexpectedly.
Example usage from the changelog:
openclaw cron add --schedule "0 8 * * *" --tools web_search,read,write myagent "run daily pipeline"
Contributed by @andyk-ms.
SearXNG Bundled Search Provider
OpenClaw now ships a built-in SearXNG provider plugin for web_search, with configurable host support. SearXNG is a self-hosted, privacy-respecting metasearch engine. For teams that want to run fully on-premises search without sending queries to third-party APIs, this is a major quality-of-life addition.
Configuration accepts a custom host, so you can point it at your own SearXNG instance. Contributed by @cgdusek.
macOS Voice Wake
macOS users get a Voice Wake option to trigger Talk Mode — letting users summon the agent by voice without manually activating the input field. Contributed by @SmoothExec.
Background Task Board (/tasks)
A new /tasks chat command exposes a session-level background task board, showing active and recent background tasks with agent-local fallback counts when linked tasks aren’t visible. This improves observability for long-running multi-step work. Contributed by @vincentkoc.
Agent Failover and Rate Limit Improvements
The release includes significant work on agent failover behavior for rate-limit scenarios. Same-provider auth profile retries are now capped before triggering cross-provider model fallback, and a new auth.cooldowns.rateLimitedProfileRotations configuration knob gives operators control over retry behavior. This reduces thundering-herd problems when a provider rate-limits a profile. Contributed by @Forgely3D.
Global Default Provider Parameters
A new agents.defaults.params configuration key allows teams to set global default provider parameters that apply across all agents. Previously, parameters like max_tokens or temperature had to be set per-agent or per-call. This simplifies configuration management for teams running large numbers of agents. Contributed by @lpender.
Gateway Chat History Truncation
The Gateway webchat now supports configurable chat history truncation via gateway.webchat.chatHistoryMaxChars and a per-request maxChars parameter. This lets teams tune how much conversation history is included in each request payload — relevant for both cost management and context window optimization.
Feishu Drive Comment Collaboration
For teams using Feishu (Lark) as their collaboration platform, this release adds a dedicated Drive comment-event flow with comment-thread context resolution, in-thread replies, and feishu_drive comment actions. Contributed by @wittam-01.
ClawHub China Mirror
Simultaneously with the release, ClawHub announced a China mirror to address package installation speed for users in mainland China. The mirror handles both skill distribution and core package delivery.
Community Reception
The release generated strong immediate engagement: the @openclaw X post announcing v2026.4.1 received 1,300+ likes within hours of publication.
For teams already running OpenClaw, the Bedrock Guardrails and cron --tools features are the two most immediately actionable additions for production security hardening.
Sources
- OpenClaw GitHub Releases — v2026.4.1
- npm package page — openclaw v2026.4.1
- docs.openclaw.ai — GLM/SiliconFlow provider updated
Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260401-2000
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