Anthropic didn’t sic their lawyers on Clawdbot. But they did send an email.
Peter Steinberger initially named his viral AI agent after Clawd, the Claude Code mascot. Anthropic owned the trademark to Clawd’s image, though, as well as the Claude name. Weeks after the launch, Steinberger changed the name to Moltbot, a move he said wasn’t his decision.
On TBPN, Steinberger described the behind-the-scenes of the name change.
“I got an email from Anthropic that I had to rename the project,” he said. “Kudos, they were really nice. They didn’t send their lawyers. They sent someone internally.”
Still, the timeline was “rough,” Steinberger said, and it’s not easy to rename a product with such name recognition on social media.
“Everything that could have gone wrong today went wrong,” he said.
Shortly after renaming the project, Steinberger said the X account was immediately snapped up by crypto sellers. X staff quickly helped Steinberger claim the handle, he said, but, for 20 minutes, “that didn’t work out so well.”
Why wouldn’t Anthropic — or any other company, for that matter — just buy Moltbot? Venture capitalists are certainly knocking down his door, Steinberger said. But the other population emailing him may put off possible acquirers: security researchers.
“This is all vibe-coded,” Steinberger said. “I don’t know if any company would touch it, because we just haven’t solved some things.”
Steinberger acknowledged that there was “absolute risk” with his product. He also likely wouldn’t be interested in a big acquisition; Steinberger said that he’d rather Moltbot be a foundation or nonprofit than a company.
While Clawdbot may have been named after Claude Code, Steinberger said he preferred coding with OpenAI’s Codex. He called Codex more straightforward, while Claude Code required more “tricks.”
When questions on his Discord server were getting out of control, Steinberger would copy and paste them straight into Codex, he said.
OpenAI’s chief marketing officer, Kate Rouch, saw the opportunity to dunk on Anthropic and took it.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post Clawdbot creator says Anthropic was ‘really nice’ in renaming email — but everything ‘went wrong’ on rebrand day appeared first on Business Insider.
