OpenClaw Photo: VCG

　　The National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China (CNCERT) on Tuesday issued a risk alert regarding the safe use of OpenClaw, as the AI agent has recently gone viral in China.

　　CNCERT advised relevant organizations and individual users to strengthen network controls when deploying and using OpenClaw, enhance credential management, strictly manage plugin sources, and continuously monitor patches and security updates.

　　OpenClaw, created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, is designed to allow large-language models to operate computers autonomously, controlling files, executing commands and interacting through messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

　　Recently, downloads and usage of the OpenClaw application have surged, with major domestic cloud platforms including Tencent and ByteDance offering deployment services.

　　The intelligent agent software directly operates computers to perform tasks based on natural-language instructions, according to CNCERT"s official WeChat account. To enable "autonomous task execution," the application is granted relatively high system privileges, including access to local file systems, reading environment variables, calling external service application programming interfaces (APIs), and installing extensions.

　　However, CNCERT found that improper installation and use of the OpenClaw agent has already led to several cases involving serious security risks.

　　Among the risks identified by the agency is a "prompt injection" threat, in which attackers embed hidden malicious instructions on web pages. If OpenClaw is induced to read such pages, it may be manipulated into leaking users" system keys.