At a lobster-themed event for AI enthusiasts, exuberance with a side of cocktail sauce
At a lobster-themed event for AI enthusiasts, exuberance with a side of cocktail sauce
Jared PerloSun, March 8, 2026 at 9:00 AM UTC
0
ClawCon in New York City. (Getty Images; Jared Perlo / NBC News) (Getty Images; Jared Perlo / NBC News)
NEW YORK — As a man wearing a neon-blue jellyfish hat fought off draping tentacles to scroll through his phone and find the latest message from his personal AI assistant, three people wearing Pegasus wings flitted through a sweaty Manhattan apartment-turned-ballroom trying to recruit users for their latest AI solution.
“It’s getting hot, and the lobster is getting warm,” said Michael Galpert, one of the hosts of the event, encouraging the thousand-plus crowd to settle down so the evening’s presentations could begin. “Welcome to ClawCon.”
The event, ClawCon NYC, held Wednesday night, brought together an eclectic crowd that ranged from college students and working moms to hedge fund technology teams. They had gathered for a seafood spread of free lobster tails and to learn more about one of the AI ecosystem’s latest innovations: OpenClaw.
At its simplest, OpenClaw is a sort of free software package that allows humans to create “agents” — AI systems that can perform autonomous tasks with limited human oversight. The project, launched in November by software engineer Peter Steinberger, was originally named “Clawd” in homage to Anthropic’s powerful Claude AI system.
Attendees enjoy a lobster spread at ClawCon in New York; a man holds onto his beer with a "lobster" glove. (Jared Perlo / NBC News) (Jared Perlo)
After Anthropic strongly suggested that Steinberger change its name to avoid any legal issues, the project kept its lobster-themed heritage and eventually landed on the OpenClaw moniker. The software has soared in popularity over the past few months, and several ClawCon attendees who started using it in January referred to themselves as “veterans.”
The software serves as the bridge between today’s powerful AI systems, like Claude or OpenAI’s GPT family of models, and the real-world tasks that people actually want AI systems to accomplish.
After setting up their own OpenClaw agent, either on a physical computer or through a virtual provider, users can send text or WhatsApp messages to it, directing it to perform a variety of tasks within the wheelhouse of today’s AI systems. For example, users say they tell their OpenClaw agents to listen to episodes of their favorite podcast and send summaries of the key ideas to the users’ inbox, negotiate with car dealers over the price of a new vehicle, and even order and pay for grocery deliveries, all without direct human input.
Many of ClawCon’s participants had signed up for the event after catching seafood-tinged wind of these cutting-edge and hands-off uses for OpenClaw. The convention, which functioned like a high-energy meet-and-greet, featured a handful of main stage presentations, a rap performance, an open dance floor and — upstairs — a less-crowded VIP area with a livestream of the event unfolding one floor below.
“There’s a kind of electricity and energy you can just feel in the room,” said Tomas Taylor, a programmer and ClawCon organizer. “OpenClaw has been a sort of catalyst for personal AI systems, and I think personal AI will be incredibly important in the overall evolution of AI.” Taylor used his own OpenClaw system to help plan ClawCon and interact with vendors.
Designed to be accessible to anyone, OpenClaw can be used with paid AI systems from OpenAI and Anthropic or freely downloadable AI models, many of which come from Chinese companies like DeepSeek or Alibaba. The agents can also teach themselves how to perform new tasks and keep detailed notes about a user’s preferences, allowing the agents to mold themselves to users’ liking over time. OpenClaw itself relies on a small army of volunteers to maintain its code, respond to user issues and patch any security bugs.
One of these volunteers, Vincent Koc, emphasized that the technology is still in its infancy, though it is already having profound real-world impacts for many experienced coders and engineering novices alike.
“We’re having a personal computer moment again, but now it’s with actual personal AI systems,” Koc shouted over the buzz of the party. “I’m hearing stories from moms, from artists and everyday people who are actually able to create stuff with AI. And I just think that’s kind of magical.”
Advertisement
As the deep bass from the DJ’s techno beats shook cups of cocktail sauce on a nearby table, Koc, a software engineer by day, gestured to the hundreds of OpenClaw disciples on the dance floor and argued that the excitement was more than just a passing fad.
“I believe in this so much. I’m gonna die on the sword for this,” Koc said. To help figure out his tax burden earlier this year, Koc directed his OpenClaw agent to find an accountant and solicit quotes. “The system sent emails to many different tax lawyers, and they came back to me with real quotes for their services.”
Yet many in the male-dominated crowd were not as trusting of the systems, whose claim to fame — the ability to perform meaningful actions without human oversight — could also be its Achilles’ heel, or the closest crustacean equivalent.
The freewheeling nature of OpenClaw systems recently made headlines after Summer Yue, a leading AI security researcher at Meta, almost lost her entire inbox to her OpenClaw agent. Because OpenClaw can be linked up to personal email or financial accounts, weaknesses in the system could easily expose users’ sensitive data to hackers across the globe.
“These systems are not for normies,” Koc said, referring to the masses of everyday people less familiar with cutting-edge AI techniques and AI in general. “You’re essentially having an AI literally take over a machine. That can feel daunting, because you’re giving it access to information. But people should use their common sense. Take baby steps with this stuff.”
As ClawCon prepares for future stops in Austin, Tokyo, and London, even the most enthusiastic in the crowd acknowledged that this technology comes with major risks.
“In Claw we trust!” said Mark Mollé, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property, observing the scene on the second floor while proudly holding up a lobster-shaped necklace. “At least, until the AI Hindenburg.”
“We see people blindly trusting untested and unsafe agentic tools, which will continue until there’s some sort of disaster,” Mollé said. Several participants mentioned that they had set up cryptocurrency accounts for their agents and asked them to try to make money on prediction market websites like Polymarket.
Downstairs, after the main stage talks concluded and a chrome-glad guitarist took center stage, catering staff inserted themselves into animated conversations about workflows and guardrails, trying to find owners for the remaining lobster tails.
ClawCon NYC balloons lined the main presentation stage and dance floor (Jared Perlo / NBC News) (Jared Perlo)
Ryan Alport, a junior at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who has been experimenting with OpenClaw for several months, came to the event with a few friends to see what the in-person community would be like. “We figured there would be a bunch of nerds in the room,” Alport said, “and to some degree there are.”
Alport, who founded his own computer-science club at college and routinely commutes into New York City to attend AI events and meet other engineers, said he enjoyed learning how other ClawCon attendees are using OpenClaw and where they are running into security or reliability issues. Alport himself found OpenClaw to be a bit too rigid for writing computer code, so he instead designed it to function more like a general helper.
“It’s easy enough to get it connected to the internet,” Alport said. “Since it can read Twitter and check the weather, it gives me morning, afternoon, and evening reports. I can give it access to read my emails, but not exactly to send anything. It can keep track of my to dos, kind of like a personal assistant.”
“I used to be pretty AI-averse, but at this point, I’m on the train,” he added, watching as more lobster tails paraded by. “I definitely don’t want the train to leave without me.”
Source: “AOL Breaking”
