ClawdBot Founder Warns About Token Scams After GitHub Hijack
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Hassan Shitu
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The founder of open-source AI assistant ClawdBot, now renamed Molbot, has issued a public warning to the crypto community after fraudsters launched fake signals using his project's name, drawing in traders and causing huge losses.
Peter Steinberger says he has never issued any tokens, has no plans to do so, and has nothing to do with the cryptocurrency he claims is related to his work.
A fake token, $CLAWD, briefly gained popularity among retailers on Solana-based meme coin platforms and reached a capitalization of around $16 million.
The momentum was short-lived; After Steinberger publicly denied his involvement, the market cap dropped from $8 million to less than $800,000.
Steinberger made the statement days after crypto traders and promoters were contacted about the sudden rise of meme coins posted around CloudBot.
Founder says token movement is hurting software project.
In a post on X, he asked investors to stop contacting him and stated that he does not take any fees or endorsements related to crypto startups.
This caution was prompted by the emergence of fake accounts marketing a token called $CLAWD, which was seen on Solana-based meme coin platforms.
The token briefly gained popularity among retailers, with some reporting early discoveries as being circulated on social media.
Traders posted on X that the event fell just as another speculative AI-related token official launch was announced.
Many users have accused anonymous token issuers of serial remote pool behavior, claiming that similar projects have been launched and abandoned under different names.
The situation was aggravated by the recent name transfer. According to Steinberger, the Cloudbot project was forced to change its name to Molbot following trademark issues.
During the naming process, errors with tag migration allowed third parties to tamper with or control related GitHub and X containers.
Those accounts were used to disguise the project and promote the crypto tokens as if they were officially connected.
Steinberger said he was working with GitHub to find the affected accounts and urged users to ignore any crypto-related claims related to the project.
ClawdBot, now Moltbot, gained attention after it went viral among developers earlier this month.
The tool is an open-source, self-powered AI assistant designed to run locally on the user's machine and integrate with messaging platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, and Slack.
Unlike web-based chatbots, it is designed to retain long-term memory, execute commands, and automate tasks directly on the user's system.
Steinberger, who previously sold software company PSPDFKit for €100 million, returned to development to build the project as a privacy-focused alternative to cloud-hosted AI tools.
At the same time, cybersecurity researchers have raised concerns about unsafe use of Cloudbot by users who are not familiar with server security.
According to blockchain security firm SlowMist and independent researchers, hundreds of instances of ClawdBot Gateway have been exposed due to proxies set up for the public internet.
These settings allow access to API keys, chat logs, and command execution capabilities.
Researchers emphasized that the issue stemmed from user configuration errors rather than a hidden exploit, but warned that the damage was serious given the tool's deep system access.
Those security warnings added to the confusion as fraudsters used the project's sudden visibility to market tokens to speculators.
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