The fact that Clawdbot ( later renamed Moltbot and OpenClaw ) went viral and, in turn, boosted the sale of Mac Minis actually points to a simple truth: when AI can genuinely do work for me, I really am willing to buy a machine for it.

Indeed, the allure of a hyper-efficient AI assistant — on call 24/7, able to read and write local files, orchestrate a browser, execute scripts, retain long-term context, and keep working continuously on the same project — is something no white-collar worker can resist.

But in real-world work, to get AI to truly do the job, it can ’ t just look at public web pages. For it to understand context and take over workflows, you have to hand it the "keys" — and not just one key, but many, such as:

Access to your email, so it can read and write messages and manage your calendar;

Read/write permissions for cloud drives and local folders, so it can organize documents and generate reports;

Access tokens for internal corporate systems, such as OA, CRM, and ERP;

API keys for all kinds of third-party services, from foundation models to automation tools.

In other words, if you want it to "act on your behalf," you have to cede some personal and corporate data and permissions to it — deliberately and under control. This is where Clawdbot truly collides with workplace reality, and where security concerns become most sensitive. For individuals, that means if emails, chat logs, file contents, or account passwords are misused or leaked, it can be a huge nightmare; for enterprises, it touches compliance, intellectual property, trade secrets, and even customer privacy. If something goes wrong, the argument of "Was it the software ’ s fault, or the user ’ s misconfiguration?" is unlikely to qualify as an excuse in the eyes of regulators or public opinion.

And in the current wave of Clawdbot hype, many deployments are a textbook "wild" environment:

Users read the README on GitHub and set up the environment themselves;

A web console is exposed to the public internet, protected by nothing more than a simple password;

All sensitive settings ( API keys, tokens, etc. ) are written into local config files, with no system-level encryption;

By default, the agent runs under a high-privilege account, with no clearly defined boundaries for file, process, or network access.

For the small group of developers who understand security and operations, these issues can still be mitigated by building their own firewall, using container isolation, and adopting proper secrets management "painstakingly patch things up"；but for the vast number of office workers and small-team founders, this is a hurdle that ’ s almost impossible to clear.

The reality is brutal: something that requires users to read a dozen-plus pages of README, write their own firewall rules, and put together a Docker Compose file simply cannot become "mainstream office infrastructure". It may attract early geek adopters, but it won ’ t make it onto an enterprise IT compliance checklist.

In recent weeks, scans of Clawbot/Moltbot instances exposed on the public internet have already made many security leaders gasp —— reports show that hundreds of such instances can already be found globally via platforms like Shodan. Some of them have no access authentication enabled at all, allowing attackers to open the admin page directly, run commands, and read configuration files. Further local directory analysis found that, in pursuit of convenient long-term memory and automation, Clawbot often writes model API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, and others; corporate VPN accounts; cloud service credentials; and even internal-system access tokens into local files in plain text formats such as Markdown and JSON — without encrypted storage and without strict access controls.

In dark web communities, there are already plenty of disguised "AI agent harvesters": compromise a Mac mini or small server running Clawbot, and you may be able to walk away with a complete bundle of personal and corporate "digital keys."

This is no longer something a README or a few blog tutorials can fix. As long as the security perimeter, permission model, secrets hosting, storage encryption, and controls over network exposure still depend primarily on end users configuring everything by hand, the adoption of local AI agents is destined to stall within a relatively "niche, power-user" circle.

That "we want it both ways — easy to use and secure" demand naturally pointed to a long-awaited concept: the AI PC.

Over the past two years, the term "AI PC" was brought up again and again: NPUs, TOPS, on-device inference, offline generation … From vendor launch events to industry reports, everyone talked about it. But for everyday users, one question was never really answered well — why do I need an "AI PC"? What can I actually do with it once I bring it home?

ClawdBot, plus system-level security endorsement, is that answer. After Clawdbot proved that "AI agents are genuinely useful," once the security shortfall is addressed, the takeoff of AI PCs is just around the corner.

Looking back from today, what Clawdbot really made go viral wasn ’ t the Mac mini itself, but a new kind of awareness:

Individuals and businesses are willing to pay hardware costs for "AI employees that can actually get work done";

They also understand they ’ re granting AI extensive access to data and resources;

So, they ’ ll care more and more about this: who is responsible for this "digital employee ’ s" behavioral boundaries and the security consequences?

Relying on a README and community guidelines alone obviously can ’ t answer that. This isn ’ t a matter of open-source authors failing to take responsibility; it ’ s the practical boundary of the technology ’ s form: security, permissions, and compliance have always been system-level problems — never something a single piece of software can solve on its own.

The ones truly positioned to seize this wave of upside are the vendors that can bundle these layers of capability together:

Build security into the hardware: a trusted supply chain, verifiable firmware, and a root of trust throughout the boot chain;

Build isolation into the system: by default, provide AI Agents with a controlled sandbox that restricts their read/write access and network behavior;

Build management into the platform: centrally host API keys and account credentials, offering an auditable, rollback-capable permissions framework;

Turn the experience into a product: let office workers launch an AI assistant right out of the box — without having to become half a DevOps engineer themselves.

Only an AI PC like this deserves the title of ) .replace ( """, the next-generation personal computing device". It is not merely "more powerful in compute" or "faster at on-device inference"; more importantly, with security no more an issue, it brings AI into everyday workstreams for real.