OpenClaw project on GitHub has surpassed 300,000 stars, ranking 9th on the site

Gate News Report: On March 13, the GitHub stars for the OpenClaw project surpassed 300,000 (approximately 308,000 as of today), ranking 9th on GitHub’s overall star leaderboard, just behind long-established learning resource projects like build-your-own-x, awesome, and freeCodeCamp. For comparison, Facebook’s React has accumulated 244,000 stars over more than ten years, and the Linux kernel has over 22,200 stars in more than 30 years.

OpenClaw was open-sourced by Peter Steinberger in November 2025 as a weekend project (originally named Clawdbot). It remained relatively unknown for several months after release. On January 26 this year, the project suddenly went viral, receiving 9,000 stars on that day, reaching 60,000 in three days, surpassing 100,000 in a week, and hitting 190,000 in two weeks. The day after going viral, it was renamed OpenClaw due to a trademark request from Anthropic. After two name changes, it settled on OpenClaw. By the end of February, the project surpassed Linux kernel, and in early March, it overtook React, completing in less than two months what others have spent over a decade building. The number of contributors has reached 1,177, with 58,000 forks. Currently, the top 8 projects ahead of OpenClaw are all static resource collections such as knowledge bases, tutorial lists, or learning paths. OpenClaw is the only active software project among the top 10.