NanoClaw creator’s turbulent six weeks ends with Docker deal

It has been a whirlwind few weeks for NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen.

About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a tiny, open-source, secure alternative to the popular AI agent-building tool OpenClaw, after building it during a weekend coding marathon. That post went viral.

“I sat down on the couch in my sweatpants,” Cohen told TechCrunch, “and basically melted into it the whole weekend, probably almost 48 hours straight.”

Around three weeks ago, a post on X praising NanoClaw from renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy also went viral.

About a week ago, Cohen shut down his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launch a company around it called NanoCo. The attention from Hacker News and Karpathy translated into 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks (people building new versions based on the project), and over 50 contributors. He has already added hundreds of updates to his project, with hundreds more in the queue.

Now, on Friday, Cohen announced a deal with Docker — the company that essentially invented the container technology NanoClaw is built on, counting millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers — to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw.

Scary Security of OpenClaw

It all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago. The startup offered marketing services such as market research, go-to-market analysis, and blog posts through a small team of people using AI agents.

The agency began booking customers and was on track to hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue, the brothers told TechCrunch.

“It was going really well, great traction. I’m a huge believer in that business model of AI-native service companies that have margins and operate like a software company but are actually providing services,” said Cohen, a computer programmer who previously worked for website hosting company Wix.

He had built the agents the startup was using, largely with Claude Code, each designed for specific tasks. But there was “a piece” missing, he said. The agent could work when prompted, but humans couldn’t pre-schedule work, or connect agents to team communication tools like WhatsApp and assign tasks that way. (WhatsApp is to most of the world what Slack is to corporate America.)

Cohen heard about OpenClaw, the popular AI agent tool whose creator now works for OpenAI. He used it to build those final interfaces and loved it.

“There was this big aha moment of: this is the piece that connects all of these separate workflows that I’ve been building,” he said, and immediately decided, “I want more of them: on R&D, on product, on client management,” one for every task the startup had to handle.

But then OpenClaw scared the bejesus out of him.

While researching a performance hiccup, he stumbled across a file where the OpenClaw agent had downloaded all his WhatsApp messages and stored them in plain, unencrypted text on his computer. Not just the work-related messages it was explicitly given access to, but all of them, including his personal messages.

OpenClaw has been widely criticized as a “security nightmare” due to the way it accesses memory and account permissions. It is difficult to limit its access to data on a machine once installed.

That issue will likely improve over time, given the project’s popularity, but Cohen had another concern: the sheer size of OpenClaw. As he researched security options for it, he noticed all the packages bundled into it. It included an “obscure” open source project he himself had written a few months earlier for editing PDFs using a Google image editing model. He had no idea it was there — he wasn’t even actively maintaining that project.

He realized there was no way for him to validate all of OpenClaw’s code and its dependencies, which, by some estimates, sprawled across 800,000 lines of code.

So he built his own in just 500 lines of code, intended for his company, and shared it. He based it on Apple’s new container technology, which creates isolated environments that prevent software from accessing any data on a machine beyond what it is explicitly authorized to use.

Going Viral

At 4 a.m., a couple of weeks after sharing it on Hacker News, his phone started ringing non-stop. A friend had seen Karpathy’s post and urged Cohen to wake up and start tweeting, which he did, setting off a public discussion with the well-known AI researcher.

Attention to NanoClaw followed like a landslide. More tweets, YouTube reviews from programmers, and news stories. A domain squatter even snagged a NanoClaw website URL. The correct one is nanoclaw.dev.

Then Oleg Selajev, a developer who works for Docker, reached out. Selajev saw the buzz and modified NanoClaw to replace Apple’s container technology with Docker’s competing alternative, Sandboxes.

Cohen had no hesitation about pushing support for Sandboxes out as part of the main NanoClaw project. “This is no longer my own personal agent 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’m going to move over to the standard.”

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

NanoClaw is free and open source and, as these things go, the Cohens vow it always will be. They know they would be strung up as villains if they ever betrayed the open source community by changing that. Currently the Cohens are living on a friends-and-family fundraising round, they said.

While they are cautious about announcing their commercial plans yet — in large part because they haven’t had a chance to fully formulate them — VCs are already calling, they say.

The game plan is to build a fully supported commercial product with services including so-called forward deployed engineers — specialists embedded directly with client companies to help them build and manage their systems. This will likely focus on assisting companies in building and maintaining secure agents. That is, however, a crowded field growing more crowded by the hour.

But given the giant community of developers that NanoClaw just unlocked with Docker, we’re sure to hear more about this soon.

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