It’s been a wild six weeks for the creators of NanoClaw who launched a partnership with Docker

It’s been a whirlwind NanoClaw Creator Gavriel Cohen.

About six weeks ago, he launched NanoClaw on Hacker News as a small, open source, secure alternative to OpenClaw’s AI-based building assistant, having created it in a weekend build. That the post went viral.

Cohen told TechCrunch: “I sat in the seat of my sweatpants, and I just melted for the rest of the week, probably about 48 hours straight.”

About three weeks ago, an X image praising NanoClaw from a famous AI researcher Andrej Karpathy became infected.

About a week ago, Cohen shut down his commercial AI startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launched a company around it called NanoCo. The interest from Hacker News and Karpathy translated into 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks (people developing new versions of the project), and more than 50. He has already added hundreds of updates to his project and hundreds more in the pipeline.

Now, Friday, Cohen announced a partnership with Docker – the company that created the container technology NanoClaw was built on, and counts millions of business developers and about 80,000 customers – to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw.

OpenClaw threat protection

It all started when Cohen started an AI business with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago. The startup provided marketing services such as market research, market analysis, and blog posts through a small team of people using AI assistants.

The company started booking customers, and was about to hit $1 million in annual rentals, the brothers told TechCrunch.

“It was going really well, a big draw. I’m a big believer in the business model of AI companies that are limited and operate like a software company but provide services,” said Cohen, a computer programmer who previously worked at the website hosting company Wix.

He also created the agents he used, mostly using the Claude Code, each designed to perform specific tasks. But there was a “piece” missing, he said. An assistant could work when told, but people couldn’t book jobs in advance, or connect assistants to social media tools like WhatsApp and assign tasks that way. (WhatsApp is to the world what Slack wants to unite America.)

Cohen heard about OpenClaw, a popular AI tool whose creator is now working at OpenAI. Cohen used it to create the final look, and he loved it.

“There was this big moment: this is the piece that connects these different parts that I’ve been building,” he said and at the same time he thought, “I want more: on R&D, on sales, customer management,” one for each of the tasks that founders have to do.

But OpenClaw scared the bejesus out of him.

While investigating the performance issue, he came across a file where an OpenClaw agent downloaded all his WhatsApp messages and saved them on his computer. Not the work-related messages he was given access to, but all, his messages.

OpenClaw has been updated a lot as “security risks” because of how it accesses memory and account permissions. It is difficult to limit access to data on a system after installation.

The issue will improve over time, given the popularity of the project, but Cohen had another concern: the growth of OpenClaw. When he checked the safety of it, he saw all the papers that were wrapped in it. It also included an “anonymous” open source project he wrote a few months ago to convert PDFs using Google’s image editing software. He didn’t know it was there – he wasn’t even serious about that job.

He realized that there was no way to verify all OpenClaw code and its dependencies, which, by some estimates, more than 800,000 tax lines.

So he created his own in just 500 lines of code, intended for use in his company, and shared it with them. He established it New technology based on Applewhich creates a remote environment that prevents applications from accessing any data on the system beyond what they are allowed to use

Having viruses

At 4 a.m., a few weeks after sharing it on Hacker News, his phone started ringing non-stop. A friend saw Karpathy’s post and encouraged Cohen to get up and start tweeting, which he did, and launched. public discussion is a well-known AI researcher.

NanoClaw’s caution followed like a landslide. More information tweets, YouTube reviews from developersand story story. A hacker hijacked a link to NanoClaw’s website. The correct one is nanoclaw.dev.

Then Oleg Selajev, a developer working at Docker reached out. Selajev saw the buzz and adapted NanoClaw to replace Apple’s technology with a competing Docker solution, Sandboxes.

Cohen didn’t hesitate to push Sandboxes support as part of the larger NanoClaw project. “It’s not my assistant anymore that I’m running on my Mac Mini,” he recalled thinking. “This now has a community around it. There are thousands of people using it. Yeah, I said, I’ll go beyond the standard.”

For all the changes these weeks have brought Cohen and his brother Lazer, who is now the CEO and president of NanoCo respectively, one area still needs to be considered: how NanoCo will make money.

NanoClaw is free and open source and, as things go, the Cohens always swear by it. They know that they will be arrested as bad if they give the open society by changing this. In the meantime, Mr. Cohen is staying at a meeting with friends and family, he said.

While they’re cautious about announcing their business plans just yet — mostly because they don’t have a chance to develop them properly — VCs are already calling, he says.

The game plan is to build a business that is fully supported by services including so-called forward-deployed engineers – experts directly integrated with client companies to help them design and improve their systems. This would focus on helping companies create and maintain safe agents. It is, however, a crowded field that is growing larger by the hour.

But thanks to the great community of developers that NanoClaw just opened with Docker, we’re sure to hear more about it soon.

Pictured above from left to right, Lazer and Gavriel Cohen.