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Original: Simon Willison · 21/02/2026

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Summary

Andrej Karpathy discusses the emerging concept of ‘Claws’, a new layer of AI agents that enhance orchestration and scheduling, while sharing insights on various implementations.

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Key Insights

“Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level.” — Karpathy’s perspective on the evolution of AI agents.
“‘Claw’ is becoming a term of art for the entire category of OpenClaw-like agent systems.” — Karpathy’s observation on the terminology surrounding new AI systems.
“I do love the concept and I think he’s right about this one, too.” — Karpathy expressing his enthusiasm for the Claws concept.

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Topics

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Full Article

21st February 2026 Andrej Karpathy talks about “Claws”. Andrej Karpathy tweeted a mini-essay about buying a Mac Mini (“The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused”) to tinker with Claws: I’m definitely a bit sus’d to run OpenClaw specifically […] But I do love the concept and I think that just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level. Looking around, and given that the high level idea is clear, there are a lot of smaller Claws starting to pop out. For example, on a quick skim NanoClaw looks really interesting in that the core engine is ~4000 lines of code (fits into both my head and that of AI agents, so it feels manageable, auditable, flexible, etc.) and runs everything in containers by default. […] Anyway there are many others - e.g. nanobot, zeroclaw, ironclaw, picoclaw (lol @ prefixes). […] Not 100% sure what my setup ends up looking like just yet but Claws are an awesome, exciting new layer of the AI stack. Andrej has an ear for fresh terminology (see vibe coding, agentic engineering) and I think he’s right about this one, too: “Claw” is becoming a term of art for the entire category of OpenClaw-like agent systems - AI agents that generally run on personal hardware, communicate via messaging protocols and can both act on direct instructions and schedule tasks. It even comes with an established emoji 🦞

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Originally published at https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/claws/#atom-everything.