OpenClawAI is being developed at a pace that'd make Microsoft blush. Models are leaping from PhD-level reasoning to gold-medal math olympiad champs and autonomous coding marathons in single-year jumps, while labs race each other and geopolitics toward agentic systems that plan, self-improve, and sometimes even try to slip their own oversight. Safety reports repeatedly warn that the capability explosion is outpacing our guardrails: hallucinations persist, misalignment risks grow, and misuse vectors (deepfakes, bio-design help, cyber scaling) multiply faster than fixes can be deployed. Meanwhile, data centers sprout like mushrooms after rain, sucking power grids dry and turning "move fast and break things" into a planetary motto. We're not quite at Skynet o'clock yet, but the gap between "wow, cool demo" and "wait, who's actually in control here?" is shrinking weekly.
OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot) is a new entrant. It took the AI world by storm when it launched an open-source, self-hosted, agent-based personal AI assistant that runs on a personal computer rather than a cloud platform. We won't delve into the problem they faced with the brand name.
In this tutorial, we show you how to install and run OpenClaw privately on your computer without having to pay a premium for services that do half of what OpenClaw can do. We will install the necessary frameworks on a Mac and use OpenClaw to run tests.
By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to:
Prepare your Mac computer
Install OpenClaw
Run a test case
Let's get started!
