Q: What is OpenClaw and why are regulators warning companies about it? A: OpenClaw is a self‑hosted, open‑source AI agent that acts as the “hands” for a large language model, able to browse the web, edit files, run system commands, and load community “skills”. Regulators in China and major Korean firms warned about OpenClaw security risks for enterprises because its access to local data, command execution, and third‑party extensions can create data leaks and hard‑to‑manage threats. Q: What are the primary security risks OpenClaw introduces to enterprise environments? A: Primary risks include data exposure from overbroad file access, unsafe command execution via prompt injection or mistakes, exposure to untrusted web content, and compromised extensions that can deploy infostealers. These risks can result in data leaks, system manipulation, lateral movement, and regulatory exposure. Q: How can organizations safely start a pilot with OpenClaw? A: To mitigate OpenClaw security risks for enterprises, begin with a narrow, well‑defined pilot using synthetic or non‑production data, run the agent in an isolated VM or container on a separate VLAN/VPC, and enforce least‑privilege access. Also lock down egress to allow‑listed domains, enable full auditing of actions and prompts, and require human approval for risky writes or code execution. Q: What protections should be applied to OpenClaw skills and extensions to reduce supply‑chain threats? A: Use an internal allowlist of vetted skills, pin versions and hashes, require signed packages and SBOMs, and perform SCA scans and code reviews before permitting extensions. Prefer in‑house or audited code to avoid hijacked or typosquatted add‑ons that security firms have found delivering infostealers. Q: Which technical guardrails prevent OpenClaw from executing harmful commands or exfiltrating data? A: Implement an execution sandbox with no root privileges, seccomp/AppArmor profiles, read‑only base images, and bind‑mount only needed paths to limit filesystem access. Combine that with network controls such as an egress proxy, DNS filtering, TLS inspection where legal, DLP on the agent host, and short‑lived secret retrieval from a vault. Q: If a company already uses OpenClaw, what immediate remediation steps should be taken? A: Freeze new skill installs and updates, rotate credentials and short‑lived tokens, sweep endpoints for unknown processes and infostealers, and purge or redact agent logs and memory that may contain secrets. Backfill monitoring with EDR rules for shell and network activity, tighten OAuth scopes, and complete a review of all installed extensions before resuming normal operations. Q: What governance and people controls should accompany technical measures for agent safety? A: Establish policies that ban agents on corporate devices without security approval, document OpenClaw security risks for enterprises in a risk register, and route new skills and model changes through change control and CAB review. Provide training on prompt injection and unsafe actions, verify third‑party license and compliance terms, and maintain an incident playbook for agent misuse and supply‑chain alerts. Q: How should enterprises measure success and scale a safe OpenClaw deployment? A: Start with staged rollout—read‑only synthetic tasks, then write tasks in test repos with gates, then limited production with approvals—and measure error rates, rollback counts, mean time to detect and approve actions, and number of risky calls blocked by policy. Compare user productivity gains against the baseline while ensuring all high‑risk actions stream to SIEM and on‑call pagers.