Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents • Hacker News Board

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#121

Post by kzahel » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #77

H8crilA wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a good place to exchange some security ideas. I've configured my OpenClaw in a Proxmox VM, firewalled it off of my home network so that it can only talk to the open Internet, and don't store any credentials that aren't necessary. Pretty much only the needed API keys and Signal linked device credentials. The models that can run locally do run locally, for example Whisper for voice messages or embeddings mo…

I think the security worries are less about the particular sandbox or where it runs, and more about that if you give it access to your Telegram account, it can exfiltrate data and cause other issues. But if you never hand it access to anything, obviously it won't be able to do any damage, unless you instruct it to.

You wouldn't typically give it access to your own telegram account. You use the telegram bot API to make a bot and the claw gateway only listens to messages from your own account

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#122

Post by ehnto » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

Dilettante_ wrote: post #113

I still haven't really been able to wrap my head around the usecase for these. Also fingers crossed the name doesn't stick. Something about it rubs my brain the wrong way.

It's just agents as you might know them, but running constantly in a loop, with access to all your personal accounts.

What could go wrong.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#123

Post by mmasu » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:03 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #44

7777777phil wrote: post #20

Karpathy has a good ear for naming things. "Claw" captures what the existing terminology missed, these aren't agents with more tools (maybe even the opposite), they're persistent processes with scheduling and inter-agent communication that happen to use LLMs for reasoning.

Why do we always have to come up with the stupidest names for things. Claw was a play on Claude, is all. Granted, I don’t have a better one at hand, but that it has to be Claw of all things…

I am reading a book called Accelerando (highly recommended), and there is a play on a lobsters collective uploaded to the cloud. Claws reminded me of that - not sure it was an intentional reference tho!

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#124

Post by mhher » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:05 PM UTC

kzahel wrote: post #112

mhher wrote: post #99

The current hype around agentic workflows completely glosses over the fundamental security flaw in their architecture: unconstrained execution boundaries. Tools that eagerly load context and grant monolithic LLMs unrestricted shell access are trivial to compromise via indirect prompt injection. If an agent is curling untrusted data while holding access to sensitive data or already has sensitive data loaded into its c…

I think this is basically obvious to anyone using one of these but they're just they like the utility trade off like sure it may leak and exfiltrate everything somewhere but the utility of these tools is enough where they just deal with that risk.

While I understand the premise I think this is a highly flawed way to operate these tools. I wouldn't want to have someone with my personal data (whichever part) that might give it to anyone who just asks nicely because the context window has reached a tipoff point for the models intelligence. The major issue is a prompt attack may have taken place and you will likely never find out.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#125

Post by embedding-shape » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:06 PM UTC

kzahel wrote: post #121

embedding-shape wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the security worries are less about the particular sandbox or where it runs, and more about that if you give it access to your Telegram account, it can exfiltrate data and cause other issues. But if you never hand it access to anything, obviously it won't be able to do any damage, unless you instruct it to.

You wouldn't typically give it access to your own telegram account. You use the telegram bot API to make a bot and the claw gateway only listens to messages from your own account

That's a very different approach, and a bot user is very different from a regular Telegram account, it won't be nearly as "useful", at least in the way I thought openclaw was supposed to work.

For example, a bot account cannot initiate conversations, so everyone would need to first message the bot, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of giving openclaw access to it then? I thought they were supposed to be your assistant and do outbound stuff too, not just react to incoming events?

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#126

Post by latexr » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

ggrab wrote: post #53

IMO the security pitchforking on OpenClaw is just so overdone. People without consideration for the implications will inevitably get burned, as we saw with the reddit posts "Agentic Coding tool X wiped my hard drive and apologized profusely". I work at a FAANG and every time you try something innovative the "policy people" will climb out of their holes and put random roadblocks in your way, not for the sake of actual…

> People without consideration for the implications will inevitably get burned

They will also burn other people, which is a big problem you can’t simply ignore.

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

But even if they only burned themselves, you’re talking as if that isn’t a problem. We shouldn’t be handing explosives to random people on the street because “they’ll only blow their own hands”.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#127

Post by krelian » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

dlt713705 wrote: post #61

altmanaltman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely interesting but i mean giving it all my credentials feels not right. Is there a safe way to do so?

In a VM or a separate host with access to specific credentials in a very limited purpose. In any case, the data that will be provided to the agent must be considered compromised and/or having been leaked. My 2 cents.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but, being contained and only having access to specific credentials is all nice and well but there is still an agent that orchestrates between the containers that has access to everything with one level of indirection.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#128

Post by krelian » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:09 PM UTC

bravura wrote: post #102

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #26

So what is a "claw" exactly? An ai that you let loose on your email etc? And we run it in a container and use a local llm for "safety" but it has access to all our data and the web?

There are a few qualitative product experiences that make claw agents unique. One is that it relentlessly strives thoroughly to complete tasks without asking you to micromanage it. The second is that it has personality. The third is that it's artfully constructed so that it feels like it has infinite context. The above may sound purely circumstantial and frivolous. But together it's the first agent that many people w…

Can you give some example for what you use it for? I understand giving a summary of what's waiting in your inbox but what else?

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#129

Post by pvtmert » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:09 PM UTC

mittermayr wrote: post #43

I wonder how long it'll take (if it hasn't already) until the messaging around this inevitably moves on to "Do not self-host this, are you crazy? This requires console commands, don't be silly! Our team of industry-veteran security professionals works on your digital safety 24/7, you would never be able to keep up with the demands of today's cybersecurity attack spectrum. Any sane person would host their claw with us…

Great idea, happy to ~steal~ be inspired by.

I propose a few other common elements:

1. Another AI agent (actually bunch of folks in a 3rd-world country) to gatekeep/check select input/outputs for data leaks.

2. Using advanced network isolation techniques (read: bunch of iptables rules and security groups) to limit possible data exfiltration.

  This would actually be nice, as the agent for whatsapp would run in a separate entity with limited network access to only whatsapp's IP ranges...

3. Advanced orchestration engine (read: crontab & bunch of shell scripts) that are provided as 1st-party components to automate day-to-day stuff.

  Possibly like IFTTT/Zapier/etc. like integration, where you drag/drop objectives/tasks in a *declarative* format and the agent(s) figure out the rest...

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#130

Post by titanomachy » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:12 PM UTC

pvtmert wrote: post #100

Does one really need to _buy_ a completely new desktop hardware (ie. mac mini) to _run_ a simple request/response program? Excluding the fact that you can run LLMs via ollama or similar directly on the device, but that will not have a very good token/s speed as far as I can guess...

I’m pretty sure people are using them for local inference. Token rates can be acceptable if you max out the specs. If it was just the harness, they’d use a $20 raspberry pi instead.