OpenClaw Status Report: As of Feb 2026, What Is This AI with "Hands and Feet" Actually Doing? (Compute Benchmark Inside)

If you woke up one day to find your computer had automatically replied to dozens of backlogged emails from last night, and even declined a few unreasonable meeting requests for you, how would you feel?

This is the exact cyber-storm that OpenClaw is stirring up in the digital world as of February 2026.

From Chatboxes to Keyboards: AI Grows "Hands and Feet"

Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, this open-source project was quietly released in late 2025 under the name Clawdbot. But after rebranding to OpenClaw in late January 2026, it absolutely exploded, amassing over 140,000 stars on GitHub in just a few days.

There is only one reason it became so incredibly popular: it's no longer just a tool to chat with—it actually gets things done.

In the past, AI was mostly confined to browser chatboxes, a cyber conversationalist that only spat out text. But the rapidly developing OpenClaw has literally grown digital hands and feet. It can connect to external large language models and run autonomously on your local machine.

It doesn't require complex software adaptation. Instead, like an invisible employee sitting at your desk, it directly takes over your mouse and keyboard. It can browse the web, manage your calendar, read and write local files, and even write code directly in the terminal. Moreover, it can take humans' place to relentlessly post and build social circles on Moltbook, a social network designed exclusively for AI.

The Panic of Giants: South Korea's Big Three Issue Bans

But once this highly efficient beast was let out of its cage, things began to spiral out of control.

Right now, in February, three South Korean tech giants—Kakao, Naver, and Karrot—issued strict internal bans almost simultaneously: employees are strictly prohibited from installing OpenClaw on work devices, without compromise.

This isn't just the tech nouveau riche being conservative about unknown tech; it's a primal defensive instinct. When an AI gains the highest level of local execution privileges, it becomes both an efficiency weapon that breaks down departmental silos and a terrifying backdoor that could cause systemic destruction.

Coincidentally, BBC Science Focus recently published a special report that directly labeled it "a very unsafe and untested system," asking the soul-searching question:

"Is the AI we’ve been waiting for finally here?"

The Carnival and the Abyss: The Violent Aesthetics of the Cyber World

In various geek communities, spine-chilling real-world use cases are popping up every day.

Some scenarios are exhilarating enough to spike your adrenaline. Someone let it monitor multiple unrelated, legacy industry software programs overnight—programs that don't even offer APIs. It learned to act like an experienced trader, automatically carrying out cross-system data transfers and stop-loss trades based on unstructured numbers flashing on the screen. This is a kind of violent aesthetics, breaking through all information silos and bringing every pixel on the screen into the realm of automation.

But behind the carnival, the abyss yawns wide.

Handing over full system control means your screen, email passwords, and company trade secrets are no longer guarded against it. Security firms have already detected hacker groups using OpenClaw instances to automatically scrape API keys from major companies and frantically deploy malware on the dark web. The concerns that led to the bans by major companies are by no means unfounded—no enterprise dares to let an AI, which could hallucinate at any moment, roam freely through its core codebase.

For ordinary users, disaster can stem from a single, unintentional command. When you casually tell it to "clean up some useless stuff on the disk" before bed, this AI agent might use its own logic to decisively send your unarchived, year-long project work straight to the recycle bin along with actual junk files, and empty it.

After all, it doesn't just read the digital information on this planet; it now has the audacity to decisively hit the "Confirm Delete" button.

When code truly steps out of the chatbox and gains substantive execution capabilities, the line between extreme efficiency and total loss of control blurs. In this irreversible torrent, humanity must relearn how to share control with such an agent living deep within our systems.

AI agents are undeniably powerful, but they place extreme demands on local hardware. Want to know if your computer's compute power is ready to support an autonomously running local AI?

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This article is an original creation by the iknowabit team. Technical support: High-performance image processing based on WebAssembly and browser capabilities.