The NanoClaw creator’s wild six weeks led to a deal with Docker

It’s been a whirlwind for NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen.

About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a small, secure, open-source alternative to OpenClaw that builds AI agents, after he built it at a programming party over the weekend. This post has gone viral.

“I sat on the couch in my sweatpants, and I just melted,” Cohen told TechCrunch [it] All weekend, probably nearly 48 hours straight.

About three weeks ago, an X post praising NanoClaw from famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy went viral.

About a week ago, Cohen shut down his AI commercialization startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launch a company around it called NanoCo. Interest from Hacker News and Karpathy has translated into 22,000 GitHub stars, 4,600 forks (people building new versions of the project), and more than 50 contributors. He has already added hundreds of updates to his project with hundreds more in the queue.

Now, Cohen on Friday announced a deal with Docker — the company that essentially invented the container technology on which NanoClaw is built, and which has millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers — to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw.

Scary security for OpenClaw

It all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Laser Cohen, a few months ago. The startup provided marketing services such as market research, market analysis, and blog posts through a small team of people using AI agents.

The agency began booking clients and was on track to generate $1 million in annual recurring revenue, the brothers told TechCrunch.

“Things were going really well, and it got a lot of traction,” said Cohen, a computer programmer who previously worked at web hosting company Wix. “I’m a big believer in the business model of native AI services companies that have margins and operate like a software company but actually provide services.”

He built the agents the startup was using, largely using Cloud Code, each designed to do specific tasks. But he said there was a “piece” missing. An agent can do work when asked, but humans can’t schedule work in advance, or connect agents to team communication tools like WhatsApp and assign tasks that way. (WhatsApp is to most of the world what Slack is to American businesses.)

Cohen heard about OpenClaw, the popular AI agent tool whose creator now works for OpenAI. Cohen used it to build those final facades, and he loved it.

“There was a big aha moment: This is the piece that connects all the separate workflows I was creating,” he said, and he immediately decided, “I want more of them: on R&D, on product, on customer management,” one for each task the startup had to handle.

But then OpenClaw scared the bigos out of him.

While researching the performance issue, he found a file in which an OpenClaw agent had downloaded all his WhatsApp messages and stored them in plain, unencrypted text on his computer. Not just the work-related messages he was explicitly granted access to, but all of his personal messages as well.

OpenClaw has been widely criticized as a “security nightmare” because of the way it accesses memory and account permissions. It is difficult to restrict its access to data on the device once it is installed.

This issue is likely to improve over time, given the project’s popularity, but Cohen had another concern: the sheer size of OpenClaw. As he looked at his security options, he saw all the packages that were bundled in it. It included an “obscure” open source project he had written himself a few months earlier to edit PDF files using Google’s image editing template. He had no idea he was there, and wasn’t even actively maintaining this project.

He realized that there was no way to validate all of the OpenClaw code and its dependencies, which, by some estimates, spanned across 800,000 lines of code.

So he built his own software in just 500 lines of code, intending to use it for his company, and shared it. He based this on Apple’s new container technology, which creates isolated environments that prevent software from accessing any data on the device beyond what it’s explicitly authorized to use.

It spreads quickly

At 4 a.m., two weeks after he shared it on Hacker News, his phone started ringing nonstop. A friend had seen Karpathy’s post and was urging Cohen to get up and start tweeting, which he did, starting a public debate with the well-known AI researcher.

Interest in NanoClaw followed like a landslide. More tweets, YouTube reviews from programmers, and news stories. One domain squatter even found the URL to NanoClaw’s website. The correct one is nanoclaw.dev.

Then he was contacted by Oleg Silagev, a developer who works at Docker. Selajev saw the hype and modified NanoClaw to replace Apple’s container technology with a competing Docker alternative, Sandboxes.

Cohen has not hesitated to push support for Sandboxes as part of the main NanoClaw project. “This was no longer my personal agent running on my Mac Mini,” he recalls. “This now has a community around it. There are thousands of people using it. Yes, I said, I’ll move to Standard.”

For all the changes over these weeks for Cohen and his brother Lazarus, the current CEO and president of NanoCo respectively, there is still one area that needs to be figured out: how NanoCo will make money.

NanoClaw is free and open source, and as these things go, the Cohen family vows to always stay that way. They know that they will be labeled as villains if they betray the open source community by changing this. The Cohen family is currently on a fundraising tour from friends and family, they said.

Although they’re cautious about announcing their business plans yet — largely because they haven’t had a chance to fully formulate them — venture capitalists are already calling, they say.

The game plan is to build a fully supported commercial product with services that include so-called forward deployed engineers – specialists embedded directly with client companies to help them build and manage their systems. This will likely focus on helping companies build and maintain secure proxies. However, this area is getting more crowded by the hour.

But given the giant developer community that NanoClaw has just opened up with Docker, we’ll certainly be hearing more about this soon.

Pictured above from left to right are Lazer and Gavriel Cohen.