In a move perhaps unsurprising to anyone familiar with trademarks, the viral Clawdbot AI agent has a new, equally lobster-y name.
The popular AI agent, which debuted in December, was originally named after the monster users see while reloading Claude Code. Then Anthropic came knocking, sparking a new name: Moltbot.
“Anthropic asked us to change our name,” Moltbot wrote on X on Tuesday. “‘Molt’ fits perfectly – it’s what lobsters do to grow.”
On his own X feed, creator Peter Steinberger was more direct: “I was forced to rename the account by Anthropic. Wasn’t my decision.”
Screenshot via Moltbot
Moltbot’s mission will remain the same: a free, open-source agent that does everything from booking dinner reservations to overseeing vibe-coding sessions.
You might wondering, why not simply remove the “d” and make it Clawbot? After all, it would fit the branding. “Not allowed to,” Steinberger wrote. Clawdbot’s mascot has also been renamed Molty.
Clawd, the official logo of Claude Code, was created in June 2024. The logo and Claude name are both trademarked by Anthropic.
Screenshots via @ceansceta1419 and Trademarkia
In an episode of the “Insecure Agents” podcast published three days before the renaming, Steinberger said he believed the “Clawdbot” name was legally viable.
“I looked it up,” Steinberger said. “There’s no trademark for this.”
Crypto traders are especially peeved by the name change, as there is an unrelated “Clawd” meme coin. Steinberger posted a message shortly after announcing the renaming, asking crypto fans to stop “pinging” and “harassing” him. “You are actively damaging the project,” he wrote.
Steinberger’s personal GitHub account was briefly taken over by “crypto scammers,” he wrote on X, though Moltbot’s account was unaffected.
Some Moltbot fans were perturbed. In one post that Steinberger reposted, an engineer tagged Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “Do you hate success?” he asked.
This isn’t the first trademark issue to result in some changes in the AI world. OpenAI scrubbed the news of its deal with Jonny Ive from its site in June, after the AI hardware startup iyO filed a dispute (Ive’s startup was called “io”). Cameo also sued OpenAI over the name of its virtual likeness tool on the Sora app, leading OpenAI to rename the feature.
