Warelay -> OpenClaw
The OpenClaw project has undergone several name changes since its initial commit in November, evolving from Warelay to its current name. It began as a WhatsApp relay CLI tool using Twilio and later expanded to support AI agent integration. The final rebranding to OpenClaw reflects its current role as a personal AI assistant platform.
- ▪The project started as Warelay, a WhatsApp Relay CLI tool using Twilio.
- ▪It was later renamed to CLAWDIS, then CLAWDBOT, Clawdbot, Moltbot, and finally OpenClaw.
- ▪Each name change reflected shifts in functionality, including support for AI agents and multiple messaging platforms.
Simon Willison files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 72 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Simon Willison |
| Canonical URL | https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/16/openclaw-names/#atom-everything |
| Publication time | 2026-05-16T20:23:30+00:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T20:40:19.047Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T20:40:19.047Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November. Thanks to this first_line_history.py tool (code here) the answer, according to the Git history of the OpenClaw README, is: Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot → Moltbot →🦞 OpenClaw Or in detail (the output from the tool): 2025-11-24T11:23:15+01:00 16dfc1 # Warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio) 2025-11-24T11:41:37+01:00 d4153d # 📡 Warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio) 2025-11-24T17:47:57+01:00 343ef9 # 📡 warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio) 2025-11-25T04:44:10+01:00 14b3c6 # 📡 warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI 2025-11-25T12:48:40+01:00 481402 # 📡 warelay — Send, receive, and auto-reply on…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison.
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