The journey for NanoClaw‘s inventor, Gavriel Cohen, has been incredibly fast-paced.
Roughly six weeks prior, Cohen unveiled NanoClaw on Hacker News. He positioned it as a compact, open-source, and secure substitute for the popular AI agent platform, OpenClaw, a project he completed during an intense weekend of coding. His announcement quickly gained widespread attention.
Describing the intense development period to TechCrunch, Cohen recounted, “I settled onto the couch in my sweatpants and essentially became absorbed in the work for the entire weekend, almost 48 consecutive hours.”
Around three weeks ago, a post on X from renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, commending NanoClaw, also achieved viral status.
Approximately a week ago, Cohen decided to shutter his AI marketing venture to commit entirely to NanoClaw, forming a new company named NanoCo. The publicity from Hacker News and Karpathy’s endorsement resulted in an impressive 22,000 GitHub stars, 4,600 forks (indicating new derivative projects), and more than 50 contributors. Cohen has since implemented hundreds of updates, with many more awaiting deployment.
Just this Friday, Cohen revealed a partnership with Docker, the pioneer of container technology foundational to NanoClaw, a company serving millions of developers and almost 80,000 enterprise clients. This agreement will see Docker Sandboxes integrated into NanoClaw.
OpenClaw’s Concerning Security Flaws
This journey began several months ago when Cohen, alongside his brother Lazer Cohen, established an AI marketing startup. Their company provided marketing solutions such as market research, go-to-market strategies, and content creation, leveraging a compact team assisted by AI agents.
The agency quickly secured clients and was projected to achieve $1 million in annual recurring revenue, according to statements made by the brothers to TechCrunch.
Cohen, a computer programmer and former Wix employee, stated, “Things were progressing exceptionally well, with excellent momentum. I firmly believe in the business model of AI-native service firms that generate profits and function like software companies while delivering tangible services.”
Cohen had developed the AI agents employed by his startup, primarily with Claude Code, each tailored for distinct functions. However, he noted a crucial missing element: while agents performed tasks on demand, human users lacked the ability to pre-schedule work or integrate agents with communication platforms like WhatsApp (which serves as a global equivalent to Slack in corporate settings) for task assignment.
Cohen then learned about OpenClaw, a widely recognized AI agent tool whose founder is now employed by OpenAI. He utilized OpenClaw to complete the user interfaces and was initially very impressed.
He described a significant realization: “This is the component that links together all these disparate workflows I’ve been constructing.” He promptly resolved to implement more, dedicating agents to areas such as R&D, product development, and client management, effectively assigning one for every operational task.
However, OpenClaw soon caused him considerable alarm.
While investigating a performance issue, he discovered a file containing all his WhatsApp messages, downloaded by the OpenClaw agent and stored unencrypted on his computer. This included not only the work-related communications it was authorized to access, but also all his personal messages.
OpenClaw has faced widespread criticism, labeled a “security nightmare,” due to its method of accessing memory and account permissions. Once installed, it proves challenging to restrict its data access on a given machine.
While this security flaw might be addressed as the project gains traction, Cohen harbored another worry: OpenClaw’s substantial codebase. During his investigation into its security, he noticed the multitude of bundled packages. Among them was an “obscure” open-source project he had developed months prior for PDF editing using a Google image model – a project he wasn’t even actively maintaining, and whose inclusion he was unaware of.
He concluded that verifying the entirety of OpenClaw’s code and its dependencies was impossible, especially given its estimated 800,000 lines of code.
Consequently, he developed his own solution, comprising only 500 lines of code, initially for internal company use before sharing it publicly. This project leveraged Apple’s novel container technology, which establishes isolated environments, thereby restricting software access to only explicitly authorized machine data.
Achieving Widespread Recognition
A few weeks after its Hacker News debut, Cohen’s phone began ringing incessantly at 4 a.m. A friend, having spotted Karpathy’s post, insisted Cohen start tweeting immediately. He complied, initiating a public dialogue with the prominent AI expert.
NanoClaw subsequently garnered immense attention, leading to numerous tweets, programmer reviews on YouTube, and news features. Even a domain squatter acquired a NanoClaw website address, though the official one remains nanoclaw.dev.
Subsequently, Oleg Šelajev, a Docker developer, contacted Cohen. Noticing the growing excitement, Šelajev adapted NanoClaw to substitute Apple’s container solution with Docker’s alternative, Sandboxes.
Cohen readily embraced integrating support for Sandboxes into the core NanoClaw project. He reflected, “This isn’t just my personal agent running on my Mac Mini anymore. It now has a thriving community. Thousands are using it. So yes, I decided to adopt the prevailing standard.”
Despite the significant transformations experienced by Cohen and his brother Lazer, who are now CEO and President of NanoCo, respectively, the business model for NanoCo’s revenue generation remains to be fully defined.
NanoClaw operates as a free and open-source project, a commitment the Cohens pledge to uphold indefinitely. They acknowledge that altering this status would be seen as a betrayal by the open-source community. Currently, the brothers are funding their operations through a friends-and-family investment round.
Although they are reserved about detailing their commercial strategies, largely because these plans are still in development, they report that venture capitalists are already reaching out.
Their strategic objective involves creating a comprehensive commercial product supported by services such as “forward-deployed engineers”—experts who integrate directly with client firms to assist in system development and management. This initiative will likely concentrate on helping businesses construct and maintain secure agents, a rapidly expanding and competitive market.
However, considering the extensive developer community NanoClaw has now accessed through its Docker integration, further announcements on this front are anticipated shortly.
Lazer and Gavriel Cohen are shown from left to right in the accompanying image.