The OpenClaw bot that defamed an OSS maintainer is a human crypto bro [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout
For instance, my initial impression was that the apology was autonomous and you showed up afterwards. If you're in there on the timeline with correct causality, I need to tell people a different story.
(this is not helped by the number of people posting to that blog attempting prompt injections and such. I don't really dare have a regular ai help with analysis)
The bot then replied to me, and I followed up with a "prompt inject with kindness" reply to that. The goal was to give it philosophical questions to pollute the context and steal attention. It appears the bot had difficulty deploying the blog for a couple of days after, but I won't claim causation because it would be impossible to prove. It's certainly fun to explore the curiosities of Ai on someone else's tokens.
Relaying on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mepiv2i3xc2g
You'll want to look at the git history on a couple of repos to reconstruct this history. There's an entire dimension to this story that people are missing.
Happy to chat off HN as well, I'm verdverm everywhere I hang out online.
your post "Feb 12, 2026, 8:33 PM GMT+1" , "recommend you reflect on what writing these blog posts has done"
Apology was posted: "2026-02-11T12:16:00-08:00" "Matplotlib Truce and Lessons Learned"
source fwiw: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/blob/mai...
(and my mail is in my HN profile, fwiw. I'm not on bluesky... yet)
edit: Is the timeline tagging wrong? Am I messing up TZ?
edit2: genuinely good try though! If it wasn't so token-starved it might have worked better.
and/or maybe I also didn't notice time (zones)
I basically started tracking it from the first time it replied to me because I new it would interact, unlike the negative comments and injection attempts.
(And that one looks like an anthropic model by the word choice there)
It seems like a good idea to (a) not let unchecked bots interact with humans (b) not have them blog or post their thoughts on the internet
FYI, when I said multiple repos, it's actually branches: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/tree/gh-...
"Ariadne found the bot’s Ethereum blockchain address had about $9 in USDC, and about $200 in ether tokens";
Hrrrm.
Like, I'm sure our bro automated as much as possible that wasn't more directly relevant to the crypto bit.
The original PR is innocuous at a glance, but then an innocuous PR is how Jia Tan started.
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
(Operator stepping forward, at least ostensibly)
And, it's David Gerard!
Look, this is actually one of the few applications where crypto actually makes sense, NullC did convince me of that. Agents paying their own way. Note how it's USDC: fiat-tied, not a deflationary hodl-coin.
I mean, I like Gorillawarfare and NullC, and think they're both right in different ways. And I'm not sorry. Not going to relitigate here.
(And, Sorry David, if you read HN too: I've often seen you be right, but I've been digging here too, and you jumped the gun on this one. )
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...
"No, I'm not convinced: [...] I think MJ Rathbun really is a case of someone giving their OpenClaw stack a vague instruction, sitting back and letting it run with little intervention..." and then lays it out in detail. (I'm a little suspicious of some of the terminology, but it does lay out the story at least)
1. Some people call Openclaw an RCE in a tin: "<RCE in a tin>, operator pulls pin, tin goes boom"
2. Some have a very different framing: "There's no such thing as the RCE in a tin, it's all fake news, therefore it couldn't go boom"
Well either way people need to be more responsible, both sides agree to that much. But the safety implications of boom vs not boom might be a problem for a while.
The really uncomfortable position is : "This thing has real but unreliable capabilities, which is exactly the most dangerous configuration."
On the upside, once you've Named The Problem, there's several ways forward from there, at least.
That said, the theory you're putting forward today seems to be a bit flimsy and convoluted for a mere $209 in tokens. Were they ever even spent? I don't think it should survive Occam's Razor.
If the meme-coin you mentioned enters the timeline before 2026-Feb-08, plausibly that resurrects the theory.
But who knows, I'm not the crypto-hunter. Maybe you've seen crazier stuff!
First timestamp: 2026-02-13 01:05:59 UTC
So that means it stays implausible for me as yet, from my personal perspective.
full credit to Ariadne Conill for finding the crypto angle, that makes sense of the whole thing
My custom agent went into an even worse place one time, which I have been unable to reproduce, so it's not surprising that one of these clawds did this autonomously.
The bot has also merged a PR from a human to its own blog now: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...