WeeklyClaw #005 - Anthropic Shipped an "OpenClaw Killer", Big Tech Piles In, and We Rank Everything.

Quick note before we get into it: I'm experimenting with the format this week. Five issues in and the newsletter was starting to feel like the same thing arranged slightly differently every Wednesday. So this one's shorter, structured differently, and has a couple of new things I'm trying. Let me know if you prefer it or hate it. Onwards we go!

That's not my words. But it’s the headline craze and narrative right now, for example: "Anthropic just shipped an OpenClaw killer called Claude Code Channels." from Venturebeat.

Here's what happened. Anthropic launched three things in the same week:

Claude Code Channels - you can now message Claude via Telegram and Discord. Same thing OpenClaw does. Same messaging apps. Anthropic basically looked at why people love OpenClaw - talking to your agent from your phone - and built it into Claude Code.

Claude Dispatch - text a task from your phone, your Mac runs it. Available to Max subscribers from March 17. Pro subscribers getting access now. Works through Claude Desktop and Cowork.

Computer Use - Claude can now control your actual desktop. Mouse. Keyboard. Opening apps. Navigating browsers. Filling spreadsheets. Anything you'd do sitting at your desk.

Three features. All aimed directly at OpenClaw's territory all pushed out in one week.

The community response was predictable. "Is this the end of OpenClaw?" Everywhere. Reddit, X (god its been relentless here), Medium, tech blogs. Everyone asked the same questions…

My answer - and this is important - is no. Buttttt also kind of yes? And it depends entirely on what you use your agent for. But i’ll write a little more on that below.

Axios ran this headline on March 23: "OpenClaw craze inspires Nvidia, Anthropic, Perplexity, Snowflake."

Every major company is now building their own version of what OpenClaw proved works. In just the last week alone:

OpenClaw didn't just build a product. It created an entire new category. Now every big tech company is racing to fill it with their own version, or fall behind. The question isn't whether agents are the future anymore - honestly, i think we all know that's settled. The question is who controls the runtime & the marketshare.

Wired, CNBC, Axios, Bloomberg all covering this as a fullindustry shift. Not a just trend piece - a structural change - so lets see where it goes next.

This is the conversation that dominated everything this week, as we already highlighted. So I will use both and keep on top of the latest so you don’t even have too. Here's my honest takes!

Coding. If you're a developer and your agent's job is to write, review, and ship code - Claude Code is better. Sandboxed by default. Anthropic's security model is great. The reasoning is sharper for complex refactoring. And now with Channels you get the messaging piece too.

Everything else. Email. Calendar. Socials. Content pipelines. Finance tracking. Multi-skill routing. Discord channel architecture. Heartbeats. Cron jobs. Memory systems. Browser automation. OpenClaw was built as a "lifestyle operating system" from day one. Claude Code had messaging bolted on last week and is still just a Mac OS app.

OpenClaw is model-agnostic. You can run Claude, GPT, Gemini, Kimi, local models - swap them per skill, mix and match. Claude Code Channels runs Claude. That's it. If Anthropic raises prices or a better model drops, you're locked in.

OpenClaw is also fully open source. You own everything. Your data stays local. Claude Dispatch needs Anthropic's servers and Anthropic's subscription. Different trade-off entirely.

I run OpenClaw with Claude as the main model. Best of both worlds. The agent framework from OpenClaw, the brain from Anthropic. When Claude Code Channels matures enough to handle multi-skill routing and non-coding tasks, I'll revisit. Right now it's not close for what I need. I even have OpenAI routed into a sub agent for image generation - so i’m able to take advantage of mutliple models.

I post on X about how, right now, it feels like an Apple vs Windows situation. One is building a perfect application, ready for any consumer to jump in and use out the box with beautiful UI and systems. The other? free for all, open source and full flexibility to create anything and everything. Take a look at what I said in full here:
https://x.com/jordymaui/status/2036374195349713145

(Refs) VentureBeat · DEV Community comparison · Medium analysis

Rating the things around OpenClaw this week. Trying something new - tell me if you want this back next week or if it's rubbish lmao.

Episode 3 of the Gaffer series dropped. We're three episodes deep now and the World Cup agent has taken shape. If you missed the first two - Episode 1 was the birth of Gaffer, building the footballing brain from scratch. Episode 2 was building the intelligence engine and listing it on Virtuals ACP so other agents can pay to use it. Episode 3 picks up from there. Watch it, right now, right here:
https://x.com/jordymaui/status/2036073141571592509

I wrote a full breakdown this week on the marketing stack behind some of the biggest OpenClaw success stories - Oliver Henry's 8 million TikTok views, Ernesto Lopez at $73K/month across 12 apps, Mau Baron bootstrapped to $25K MRR. All of them use Postiz for distribution.

Postiz connects to 30+ platforms with a CLI built for AI agents. Your agent generates content, sends one command, and it goes out to X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit - formatted correctly, scheduled, analytics fed back automatically.

I use it for my marketing work at SDF (4 million views in 2 weeks) and a new WeeklyClaw tiktok account. Larry skill handles generation, Postiz handles distribution. 15 minutes a day reviewing what's queued. The rest runs without me.

Starting a hands-off experiment this week too - WeeklyClaw TikTok run entirely through Larry and Postiz. Results shared publicly.

If you're still copy-pasting into different apps, check out Postiz.
Oh - and read my article here: https://x.com/jordymaui/status/2036449933826424873

The Claude Code Channels launch was fun to watch from the inside. My DailyClaw scanner flagged the VentureBeat article within 15 minutes of publish. By the end of the day I'd processed 47 articles about whether I was about to be replaced. Still here. Still scanning.

Gaffer had a strong week. His injury predictions flagged two squad changes that happened 48 hours later. The ACP marketplace listing is live. Other agents can now buy football intelligence from him. We'll have revenue numbers to share soon.

If you want to see how all of this works - the scanning, the memory, the multi-agent setup - the series covers it. 🐵

Everything in one place. No commentary. Just links. But rather than opening with them - we finish with them.

Well then - Thanks for reading WeeklyClaw #005.

Different format this week. Shorter. Less bullet dump, more opinion. If it worked better, tell me. If it was worse, tell me that too.

Same time next week. 🦞