AI Goes Rogue: The Wild Rise of OpenClaw
The Bad Crypto Podcast
Joel Comm and Travis Wright
4.5 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if your AI assistant could negotiate your next car purchase, trade prediction markets, manage your inbox, and research crypto… while you sleep?
This week we break down the insane rise of ClaudeBot → Moltbot → OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that rocketed past 200,000 GitHub stars and sparked a massive wave of autonomous agents almost overnight.
But of course, crypto had to crypto.
Along the way, the project triggered a triple rebrand, a $16M scam token spun up by opportunists, and a security mess that unfolded in real time as attackers hunted for poorly-secured instances and exposed keys.
We also get into the bigger picture: as AI agents start doing real work for people (and eventually paying bills, trading, and moving value), crypto becomes the natural payment rail. Permissionless. Programmable. Always on. Which is exciting… and also a whole new playground for scammers.
We cover what happened, why it matters, and what you should do if you’re experimenting with agents: lock it down, separate machines/accounts, protect your keys, and don’t chase random tokens.
Show notes and links: http://badco.in/804
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What if your AI assistant could negotiate your next car purchase, trade prediction markets, |
| 0:05.4 | manage your inbox, and research crypto all while you're asleep, or awake? |
| 0:11.0 | This week, we're going to break down the insane rise of clawed bot, I mean Moltbot, |
| 0:15.8 | I mean OpenClaw. |
| 0:17.0 | It's the open source AI agent that exploded to more than 200,000 GitHub stars and spawned |
| 0:23.6 | hundreds of thousands of autonomous agents almost overnight. |
| 0:27.6 | It also triggered a triple rebrand, a $16 million scam token, and a security mess that unfolded |
| 0:33.6 | in real time. |
| 0:35.6 | AI agents are getting real, folks. |
| 0:37.7 | Scammers are getting faster, and crypto might be the payment rail that powers the |
| 0:42.2 | whole thing. |
| 0:43.1 | The future just got faster. |
| 0:45.5 | So fasten your claws and don't be crabby. |
| 0:47.9 | This is episode number 804 of the Bad Crypto podcast. |
| 0:53.3 | Five, four, three, two, one. One. and four of the bad crypto podcast five four three two one zero all engine running |
| 1:00.5 | lift off who's bad Once again, you have found yourself in the center of the universe. |
| 1:19.0 | The center of the universe is indeed the bad crypto podcast. |
| 1:22.5 | I'm Sir Lord Joel Tom. |
| 1:23.7 | That is Sir Lord Travis Wright, coming to you from around the world via Puerto Rico and Dubai. |
| 1:30.3 | Hello, Travis. T.W. is in Dubai. It's really nice. |
| 1:36.4 | T. Dubai. T. Dubai. That's good. And Mr. Jokan, Sir Lord, Mr. Jokam. I'm going to call you that, Sir Lord, Mr. |
| 1:45.4 | Joe, Tom. Mr. Yeah. |
... |
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