An AI tool got sued over its name. By Anthropic. The company that makes Claude. The company built on research papers they published openly, on the back of transformer work that came out of Google, in a field that owes everything to open academic exchange.
The irony is not lost on us. It's partly why this site exists.
What Was Clawdbot?
Clawdbot was a community-built AI assistant — a productivity tool that leaned into the claw/cat aesthetic that a lot of AI tooling had started adopting. Think of it as a scrappy indie project in a space dominated by billion-dollar frontier labs. It had a small but dedicated user base who liked the personality and the independence.
The name was cheeky. Deliberately so. "Clawd" plays on Claude — Anthropic's flagship model — with a claw spin that fit the cat-creature visual identity. It was the kind of naming that works fine when you're a tiny project in a big pond.
The problem is the pond got a lot smaller, and a lot more commercially important, very quickly.
Anthropic Went Legal
At some point, Anthropic's legal team sent a cease-and-desist. The claim, as best as can be understood from public accounts: brand confusion. "Clawd" is too close to "Claude." In a market where users are actively evaluating AI tools side-by-side, Anthropic has a legitimate interest in protecting against a scenario where someone thinks they're using an Anthropic product when they're not.
Is the legal argument valid? Probably, yes. Trademark law isn't about whether two things are obviously different to an informed observer. It's about whether they could confuse an average consumer at the relevant moment of purchase. "Clawdbot" and "Claude" are close enough that a reasonable trademark dispute could succeed.
Does that make it feel good? Absolutely not.
The Rebrand: Clawdbot Becomes OpenClaw
The project didn't fold. Clawdbot rebranded to OpenClaw — leaning into the "open" positioning as a deliberate contrast to closed frontier labs. Smart move. The rename turned a legal setback into a marketing statement.
Clawdbot (now OpenClaw) kept its user base, kept its personality, and arguably came out of the situation with a clearer identity than it started with. When your brand story begins with "Anthropic tried to shut us down," you have the kind of origin narrative that money can't buy.
Community reaction split roughly how you'd expect. A vocal contingent thought Anthropic was being heavyhanded — bullying indie developers in a field those same developers help evangelise. Another group thought trademark protection is just how IP law works and Clawdbot should have seen it coming. The more interesting observation is how quickly the whole thing became a symbol for a broader tension: the open-research roots of AI versus the increasingly locked-down commercial present.
What This Says About the Industry
Here's the editorial take: Anthropic coming after Clawdbot over a name is understandable from a legal and brand perspective. It is also a bit rich coming from a company whose foundational models were built on publicly available research, whose alignment work was developed in the open, and which has benefited enormously from a community that treats AI as a shared project.
That's not hypocrisy exactly. It's the natural friction of commercialisation. Once there's real money involved, open-research ideals collide with brand protection instincts, and the lawyers get busy.
The more interesting question is what happened to Clawdbot after the rebrand. We think that's worth watching. A tool that survived a cease-and-desist and came out stronger has something going for it. We'll be covering the Clawdbot (now OpenClaw) story as it develops — consider this Part 1.
Why This Site Is Called Clord
You deserve a direct answer.
"Clord" comes from this lineage. Claude → Clawdbot → OpenClaw → the claw etymology that connects them. We're not affiliated with any of these. We're not Anthropic. We're not Clawdbot. We're a blog.
The name is a nod to the community thread, a bit cheeky, and entirely intentional. We picked it because we wanted a name that had a story behind it — and this is one of the more interesting stories happening in the AI space right now. A scrappy indie project getting pressured by a frontier lab, rebranding, and coming out the other side with a better identity.
That's the kind of thing worth following. That's the kind of thing worth writing about.
We're here for it. This is Part 1 of an ongoing series on the Clawdbot saga.