The open-source AI agent space has been gaining momentum as a counterweight to the major lab ecosystem, and that energy found a physical home on a Wednesday evening in Manhattan.
OpenClaw — the AI assistant platform created by Peter Steinberger in November 2025 — drew hundreds of people to Ideal Glass Studios for ClawCon NYC, a free community meetup built around the open-source tool. More than 1,300 people signed up; attendance was capped at around 700. The venue offered pink and purple lighting, lobster claw headbands, a demo stage beneath a skylight, and a buffet table stacked with lobster claws, charcuterie boards, Tabasco sauce, lemons, and floral arrangements.
The platform, previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbolt, has built a following in the tech industry precisely because it operates outside the closed systems run by Google, OpenAI, and other major labs. Its appeal is ideological as much as technical. According to the report, the tool remains unpredictable and carries significant security risks — but its community frames those trade-offs as the cost of independence.
A grassroots gathering with a global footprint
“AI was controlled by the big labs,” said Michael Galpert, one of the event’s hosts. “This is kind of a watershed moment where Peter kind of busted down the doors.” Galpert, whose background includes working on Fortnite at Epic Games, said the idea for the event emerged through Discord — the same kind of messaging platform, alongside WhatsApp and Telegram, that first drove OpenClaw‘s early adoption.
The event was billed as a “social-first gathering — not a gated, developer-only conference or a traditional corporate trade show.” ClawCon NYC is part of a broader tour of global meetups. A San Francisco event preceded it last month; upcoming stops include Miami, Austin, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Madrid.
Onstage, Galpert addressed the crowd directly: “All your friends and family probably think you’re crazy, and the whole point is for you to be in a room with other crazy people so it’s normal.”
The people inside the room
Attendees came with divergent use cases. Dan Kazenoff said he is building a natural language engine for decentralized finance but finds OpenClaw difficult to run in isolated environments — a gap that typically pushes him toward Claude Code, which he described as expensive. He came looking for others experimenting with open-source agentic tools. Alex Wu said he has used the platform for roughly two months to scrape e-commerce data from Chinese and Japanese markets in order to extract cultural trends. He also cited the food as a factor in his attendance. Rick Galbo, who works in AI R&D, said he showed up believing the event was a hackathon before realizing otherwise.
The event’s next stops on the global tour — Miami, Austin, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Madrid, and additional cities — are scheduled to follow the same format.
Photo by Caleb Oquendo on Pexels
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
