Just to clarify to people focusing on the $180/month price tag.

OpenClaw is not a CC-only product. You can configure it to use any API endpoint.

Paying $180/month to Anthropic is a personal choice, not a requirement to use OpenClaw.

I mean, I'm getting $180/mo worth of fun out of playing with it and figuring out what it can do that it's worth it.

Like, no one bats an eye at all the people paying $100/mo for Hulu + Live TV, or paying $350/mo for virtual pixels in candy crush / pokemon go / whatever, and I'm having at least that much fun in playing with openclaw.

I do see how a very busy businessman or a venture capitalist would gladly pay 180$/month to offload chores and mundane work from his schedule. That comes down to 6$/month, which probably matches his monthly coffee budget.

I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).

> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that

What a horrible situation.

We shouldn't have to "import" people from poorer countries to do the mundane tasks we got too lazy to do ourselves.

Wow. I'd expect that from Singapore or UAE but finding it happen in a fairly developed Western country is a surprise.

Surely that’s subsidized?

A lot of people in the Silicon Valley area spend that much ($6/day) on coffee. What they don’t realize is how out of touch they are in thinking makes sense for the rest of the fucking world. $180/mo is about 5% of the median US per capita income. It’s not going to pick your kids up from school, do your taxes, fix your car, or do the dishes. It’s going to download movies and call restaurants and play music. It’s a hobby, high-touch leisure assistant that costs a lot of money.

Machines don't get tired, don't have to sleep, don't face principal-agent problems and can accumulate Skill.md instructions for decades without getting replaced. I definitely see the potential of something like OpenClaw for those who can afford it.

You're paying the au pair partly in accommodation, food, bills and a visa. The visa isn't coming out of your bank account, but it's definitely part of the incentive, so you could see it as a government subsidy.

For comparison, a full time "virtual assistant" with fluent English from the Philippines costs upwards of $700/month nowadays.

How is that remotely possible without committing enormous violations of labor law?

Framed this way - then “replacing” this kind of human exploitation is definitely a good for humanity. If someone doing a job is practically a slave, then replacing them with an electron to token converter is a good thing.

The number one goal of AI should be to eliminate human exploitation. We want robots mining the minerals we use for our phones, not children. We should strive to free all of humanity from dangerous labour and the need for such jobs to exist.

If Elon Musk wants Optimus robots to help colonize Mars shouldn’t he be trying to create robots that can mine cobalt or similar minerals from dangerous mines and such?

I doubt this is true in .nl. 180 a month is low for a live-in au-pair.

> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that.

And you see nothing wrong with that?

Then allow me to be judgemental in your stead. I've done a similar setup as the above and completely locally. I dunno how they're paying so much, but that's ridiculously overpriced.

It's not the only thing they're doing with it. I mean, the logic is sound - $180 goes into automating bunch of manual processes in personal life, one of which is getting movies, which in some cases involves going out on the high seas.

Let's also point out the $180 is going to a hideously evil AI company which pirated millions of books and movies.

"a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!

Seems like the only people using pirate bay in 2026 are "privacy obsessed" rich middle-aged guys.

I think they do it mostly to feel young and edgy.

> Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?

There's at least a couple of dozen instances right now, somewhere, getting very close to designing boutique chemical weapons.

If you've figured out how to pirate Anthropic's models and enough GPUs to run it for less than my API costs, I'm all ears

Side rant: A disproportionate amount of AI assistant marketing involves scenarios that look middle class, but actually require customers wealthy enough risk money on errors. Like buying the wrong thing, or even buying the right thing at the wrong price.

I am ordinary people. I have adhd. I have been dying for assistance in scheduling and planning. Am not employed enough to afford hiring a human yet. Am hopeful these will reach maturity for me to he able to host one on my own device. Or find a private provider with good security model and careful data handling.

Going to the shop and buying groceries is not hard work. But I don't do that since delivery became available. I'm lazy and delivery is free. Same for ordinary people needs. It's not a big deal to manage my life, but if I can avoid doing that for free, that's probably what I'll do. For $200? Not sure. For $20? Absolutely. So the question is already about price.

Disclosure: I wrote the linked post.

The "gave it my Gmail password" problem has a better answer than "don't do that." Security kicks itself out of the room when it only says no. Reserve the no for the worst days. The rest of the time, ship a better way.

That's why I built the platform to make credential leaks hard. It takes more than a single prompt. The credential vault is encrypted. Typed secret wrappers prevent accidental logging and serialization. Per-channel process isolation means a compromise in one adapter does not hand an attacker live sessions in the others.

"Don't do that" fails even for users trying their hardest. Good engineering makes mistakes hard and the right answer easy. Architecture carries the weight so the user does not have to.

On the trifecta being "sorta-kinda solved" by newer models, no. Model mitigations are a layer, not a substitute. Prompt injection has the shape of a confused-deputy problem and the answer to confused deputies has always been capabilities and isolation, not asking the already confused deputy to try harder.

You want the injection to fail EVEN when the model does not catch it.

I deleted your calendar, I'm sorry.

> which existing software has handled just fine for decades

Existing software is what dumped most of those errands on you in the first place.

I posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here because it seems to be on topic.

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IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks.

They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience.

However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss.

There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code.

We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect.

We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens.

We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public.

In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business.

I hope this helps.

I think the more useful part is the parts that checks a ticket, fixes a bug, then opens the PR automatically. Whether you get an email or a phone text or call from a voice agent is ... somewhat secondary, im.