New Delhi, Feb. 4 -- In a tech cycle crowded with polished demos and carefully staged launches, OpenClaw's sudden rise stood out for a different reason, it wasn't built to go viral. Yet within days of its release, the open-source AI agent crossed 150,000 stars on GitHub, drawing intense attention from developers, early adopters, and cybersecurity experts alike.

What began as a personal productivity experiment has since turned into a broader conversation about how close AI agents are to moving from controlled tools to autonomous actors and what risks that shift introduces.

Built by Austrian researcher Peter Steinberger to organise his own digital life, OpenClaw arrived quietly. Its breakout moment came not from a corporate announcement, ...