The Claw Market Map, Q1 2026

OpenClaw has become infrastructure. Companies are building entire businesses on top of it, and new categories are emerging in real time. We mapped the landscape.

What you’re looking at

Managed hosting. A dozen providers now offer one-click OpenClaw deployment. Kilo (backed by GitLab’s co-founder), EveryClaw, ClawBox, and others are competing to make agent hosting as simple as spinning up a Vercel project.

LLM routing & orchestration. OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Manifest and smart-router let agents switch between Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, and cost-effective models like Kimi K2.5 on the fly. This is becoming the middleware layer of the agent stack.

Security. The elephant in the room. The ClawHavoc incident exposed 341 malicious skills on ClawHub. Cisco called it a “security nightmare.” SecureClaw, VirusTotal integration, and OpenClaw Scanner emerged in response. Security tooling for autonomous agents is still early, but demand is massive.

Skill marketplaces & registries. ClawHub hosts 3,200+ curated skills across 28 categories. VoltAgent maintains an awesome-list of vetted skills. The npm-for-agents analogy is real, and so are the supply chain risks that come with it.

Agent social networks. Moltbook, MoltMatch, agent-to-agent protocols. 18 dedicated agent communication standards already exist. Whether this becomes meaningful infrastructure or a curiosity remains to be seen.

Why this matters beyond the hype

OpenClaw clearly hit a nerve. People want AI that actually does things on their behalf, locally, across their own tools, without being locked into a platform.

In 60 days:

• 230K+ GitHub stars
• 116K+ Discord members
• ClawCon touring globally (SF, Berlin, Tokyo…)
• A dedicated startup validation platform (TrustMRR), already tracking 112+ OpenClaw startups by verified revenue, some pulling $40K+ MRR
• An entire ecosystem of companies, tools and integrations forming around a single open-source project

When DigitalOcean and Contabo are shipping one-click deploys, when security researchers are building dedicated scanning tools, that’s not a community experiment. That’s a market forming in real time.

Where Manifest fits

At Manifest, we build an open source OpenClaw platform that analyzes each query locally in under 2ms and sends it to the most adapted model that can handle it. No data leaving your machine. If you’re running agents daily and you’ve never looked at what each action actually costs you, that’s the problem we’re solving. You can install it in one command and start seeing where your tokens go.