Open-source AI assistant Clawdbot has been renamed Moltbot after Anthropic objected to the project’s branding. The issue was not a product overhaul or team change. Anthropic argued that “Clawd” sounded too close to its flagship model Claude, and that the project’s previous X profile image closely resembled Anthropic’s trademark logo.
Anthropic objected to both the name and the visual identity
According to the project’s account, Anthropic asked for a rename. Founder Peter Steinberger wrote on X that he was forced to change the account name and said it was not his choice. When others suggested switching to “Clawbot” by dropping the letter d, he replied that it was “not allowed”, suggesting the company was also sensitive to names built around the “Claw-” construction.
From a trademark perspective, the complaint has a legal basis. Inside the developer community, though, the move drew criticism because the project had been seen as helping expand the Claude ecosystem rather than competing with it directly.
Moltbot keeps the lobster theme
Steinberger handled the rename with humor. The new name, Moltbot, comes from molting, the process by which a lobster sheds its shell in order to grow. The official announcement used the line: “Same lobster soul, new shell.”
The branding changed fast, but the core project did not. The team’s message was simple: the shell is different, the assistant remains the same.
A roughly 10-second gap led to account hijacking
The messy part came during execution. Steinberger tried to change the GitHub organization name and the X handle at the same time, but there was a brief gap between releasing the old name and securing the new one. In about 10 seconds, crypto scammers grabbed the freed @clawdbot account and the GitHub organization name.
He then issued a direct warning: “I will never launch a coin. Any project claiming I am launching one is a scam.” The source also says he later posted that the GitHub account had been recovered. The episode showed how quickly high-visibility open-source projects can become targets during a branding transition.
Backlash spread across the developer community
The rename sparked criticism beyond the project’s own users. DHH, short for David Heinemeier Hansson and best known as the creator of Ruby on Rails, called Anthropic’s recent behavior “hostile to customers.” That reaction captured the split at the center of the dispute: a company may defend a trademark successfully in legal terms while still taking damage in how developers view the brand.
The source also notes that Moltbot still faces security and growth questions, especially around risks created by overly open permissions.
Why the project drew so much attention
Clawdbot, now Moltbot, was created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, founder of the PDF tooling company PSPDFKit, which was acquired by Insight Partners. The project is positioned as a self-hosted AI assistant that can carry out tasks such as email management, calendar handling, call screening, restaurant booking, and even local system access through Shell.
It also supports major messaging platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, iMessage, Signal, and Discord. In less than 24 hours, the project collected 9,000 GitHub stars. By the figures cited in the source, that total had climbed past 72,000, making it one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in GitHub history.