What are claws? The next AI term you’ll need to know.
It seems like every week or two there's a trendy new AI buzzword flying around the internet. This week, it's "claws," a new type of AI assistant.
Many people, from prominent AI evangelists to regular folks on message boards, have started using the term in recent weeks, which can feel pretty alienating if you aren't totally plugged into the AI ecosystem. To fully understand claws, you need to be familiar with OpenClaw (aka Clawdbot), agentic AI, and a few other recent AI trends. So, allow us to give you a basic breakdown of what claws are and why everyone is talking about them.
What are claws? A simple explanation.
Put simply, a claw in this context is a special type of open-source AI personal assistant that runs locally on a device, often a Mac Mini. You can give it access to your calendar, your email, coding tools, internet browsers, AI models, and more. Using all these tools, your "claw" can autonomously perform tasks on your behalf. If you want it to answer your emails and schedule any necessary meetings, it can do that. If you want your claw to code a new app while you're sleeping, you can connect it to your ChatGPT or Claude account and let it go to work.
Recently, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy posted a mini-essay on X, where he talks about "tinkering with claws."
You might recognize Karpathy as the man who helped coin the term "vibe coding," the AI buzzword of 2025. So, when Karpathy starts throwing around new AI lingo, people pay attention.
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As Karpathy talks about in the post, it's become popular to run claws locally on a Mac Mini, Apple's very powerful little desktop computer. However, you can run it on other devices, with Raspberry Pi devices being one popular alternative.
If you want an etymology of the term, it's a direct reference to Clawdbot. Clawdbot is an open-source AI assistant with read-level access to a user's device, and it's been the talk of the town in Silicon Valley for weeks. (Clawdbot recently changed its name to OpenClaw to get out of Anthropic's crosshairs, at which point its inventor was hired by OpenAI.) In Karpathy's post, he also lists several OpenClaw alternatives, like NanoClaw, ZeroClaw, IronClaw, and more. The point is that there are suddenly a lot of these agentic AI assistants floating around the internet, making it perhaps the most trendy movement in AI right now.
Hopefully, this is a decent enough starting point for understanding what claws are and why people are excited about them. If you feel moved to try it out, be our guest. If not, you'll probably be fine, too. The world is your oyster.