SafeClaw 🐾

The zero-cost alternative to OpenClaw. No LLM required, though it is optional. No required API bills. Minimal attack surface. Runs on any machine.

ONE HUNDRED STARS — We hit ONE HUNDRED stars on GitHub! This milestone is our biggest update since our original release. It brings: Real Research, Simple AI Setup, and Smart Learning. Research now searches arXiv and Semantic Scholar for real academic papers, asks Wolfram Alpha for computational answers. setup ai sk-ant-your-key instantly configures Anthropic (or any provider) — or setup ai local for free Ollama. The parser auto-corrects typos, converts word-numbers ("one" → 1), and learns from your mistakes automatically. See the new features below. Previous milestone: Fuzzy Learning & Personalization. While OpenClaw users are burning $200/day and $3,600/month on API tokens, SafeClaw delivers 90% of the functionality using traditional programming — rule-based parsing, ML pipelines, and local-first tools. Your API bill: $0. Forever. If you choose to use the language models for blogging, coding and research, then yeah, you'll have a bill, but you can also do all of that without a language model on safeclaw. We simply provide both options.

SafeClaw uses VADER, spaCy, sumy, YOLO, Whisper, Piper, and other battle-tested ML techniques instead of generative AI. The result: deterministic, predictable, private, and completely free to run.

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Why SafeClaw?

| | SafeClaw | OpenClaw | |---|---|---| | Monthly cost by default | $0 | $100–$3,600+ | | Requires LLM | No (optional for AI blogging, coding, and research all have no LLM options) | yes | Prompt injection risk | Minimal (only if a url you go to is malicious) | Yes (everywhere) | | Works offline | Yes all default features, except weather | No | | Runs on any machine | Yes (Linux, macOS, Windows) | Needs powerful hardware or cloud APIs | | Deterministic output | Yes | No (LLM responses vary) | | Privacy | Local by default (external only when you ask or setup an llm, e.g. weather) | Data always sent to API providers |

Full Comparison: SafeClaw vs OpenClaw

| Feature | SafeClaw | OpenClaw | |---|---|---| | Self-hosted | ✅ | ✅ | | Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) | ✅ | ✅ | | No AI/LLM required | ✅ | ❌ | | Offline capable | ✅ | ❌ | | Zero API cost | ✅ | ❌ | | Prompt injection risk | Minimal (only LLM research) | Everywhere | | Privacy-first | ✅ (local by default) | ✅ | | Voice (STT/TTS) | ✅ (Whisper + Piper, local) | ✅ (ElevenLabs, paid API) | | Smart home control | ✅ | ✅ (via skills) | | Bluetooth control | ✅ | ❌ | | Network scanning | ✅ | ❌ | | Social media summaries | ✅ (Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky) | ❌ (requires separate skills) | | Multi-channel | ✅ (CLI, Telegram, Webhooks) | ✅ (13+ platforms) | | Web crawling | ✅ | ✅ | | Summarization | ✅ (extractive) | ✅ (AI-generated) | | RSS/News feeds | ✅ (50+ feeds) | ✅ (via skills) | | Sentiment analysis | ✅ (VADER) | ✅ (AI) | | Email integration | ✅ | ✅ | | Calendar support | ✅ | ✅ | | Document reading | ✅ | ✅ | | Desktop notifications | ✅ | ✅ | | Object detection | ✅ (YOLO) | ❌ | | OCR | ✅ (Tesseract) | ❌ | | Cron jobs | ✅ | ✅ | | Webhooks | ✅ | ✅ | | Plugin system | ✅ | ✅ (5,700+ skills) | | Free-form chat | ❌ | ✅ | | Blog with and without LLM | ✅ no llm (extractive titles) with LLM, AI blogging | ❌ (always requires AI) |
Blog publishing (WordPress, Joomla, SFTP) | ✅ | ❌ (requires plugins) | | Writing style learning | ✅ (statistical profiling) | ❌ | | Academic research (arXiv, Scholar) | ✅ (free, no API key) | ❌ | | Wolfram Alpha | ✅ (computational knowledge) | ❌ | | Simple setup (enter key or local) simple telegram and blogging setup | ✅ (one command) | ❌ | | Auto-learning from mistakes | ✅ (word-to-number, typo correction) | ❌ | | Research pipeline | ✅ (two-phase, LLM optional) | ✅ (AI only) | | Code templates & tools | ✅ (7 templates, offline utils) | ❌ (requires AI) | | Auto-blog scheduling | ✅ (cron-based) | ❌ | | Task-aware prompts | ✅ (per-task LLM routing) | ✅ | | Command chaining | ✅ ("read email and remind me at 3pm") | ✅ | | Autonomous multi-step tasks | ❌ | ✅ | | Self-writing skills | ❌ | ✅ | | Browser automation | ❌ | ✅ |

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Features

🗣️ Voice Control

• Speech-to-Text — Whisper STT runs locally, no cloud transcription
• Text-to-Speech — Piper TTS for natural voice output, completely offline
• Voice-first workflow — Talk to SafeClaw like you would any assistant

🏠 Smart Home & Device Control

• Smart home integration — Control your connected devices
• Bluetooth device control — Discover and manage Bluetooth devices
• Network scanning — Device discovery on your local network

📱 Social Media Intelligence

• Twitter/X summarization — Add accounts, get summaries of their activity
• Mastodon summarization — Follow and summarize fediverse accounts
• Bluesky summarization — Track and summarize Bluesky feeds
• No API tokens needed for public content

📰 RSS News Aggregation

• 50+ preset feeds — Hacker News, Ars Technica, BBC, Reuters, Nature, and more
• 8 categories — Tech, World, Science, Business, Programming, Security, Linux, AI
• Custom feeds — Import any RSS/Atom feed
• Auto-summarization — Extractive summaries with sumy (no AI)
• Per-user preferences — Customize your news sources

🔒 Privacy & Security

• Self-hosted by default — Your data stays local unless you explicitly request external info (like weather)
• No API keys required — Core features work completely offline
• No cloud AI dependencies — No tokens sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google
• Minimal prompt injection surface — Core features (blogging, coding, commands) use rule-based parsing with zero LLM, so they're immune to prompt injection. Research and deep analysis can optionally use an LLM to synthesize sources — when enabled, content from external sources (arXiv abstracts, web pages) is fed to the LLM, which carries a minimal prompt injection risk. Phase 1 research (gathering/summarizing) never uses an LLM and is safe. We're transparent about this tradeoff.

📡 Multi-Channel

• CLI — Interactive command line with Rich formatting
• Telegram — Full bot integration
• Discord — Coming soon
• Slack — Coming soon
• Webhooks — Inbound and outbound support

⚡ Automation

• Command chaining — Combine actions naturally: "read my email and remind me at 3pm"
• Web crawling — Async crawling with depth limits and domain filtering
• Summarization — LexRank, TextRank, LSA, Luhn algorithms
• Reminders — Natural language time parsing with dateparser
• Shell commands — Sandboxed command execution
• File operations — Search, list, read files
• Cron jobs — Scheduled task automation
• Daily briefings — Weather, reminders, news from your feeds

📊 Text Analysis

• VADER Sentiment — Lexicon-based sentiment analysis
• Keyword Extraction — TF-IDF style extraction
• Readability Scoring — Flesch-Kincaid metrics

📧 Email Integration

• IMAP Support — Read emails from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo
• SMTP Support — Send emails
• Standard protocols — No API keys required

📅 Calendar Support

• ICS Files — Import and parse .ics calendar files
• CalDAV — Connect to Google Calendar, iCloud (optional)
• Event filtering — Today, upcoming, by date range

📄 Document Reading

• PDF — Text extraction with PyMuPDF
• DOCX — Microsoft Word documents
• HTML/Markdown/TXT — Plain text formats

🔔 Notifications

• Desktop notifications — Cross-platform (macOS, Windows, Linux)
• Priority levels — Low, normal, high, urgent
• Rate limiting — Prevent notification spam

👁️ Optional ML Features

• NLP — spaCy named entity recognition (~50MB)
• Vision — YOLO object detection + OCR (~2GB)
• OCR — Tesseract text extraction from images (lightweight)

🔬 Real Research Sources

• arXiv — Search academic papers across CS, math, physics, biology, and more (free, no API key)
• Semantic Scholar — Academic papers with citation counts and author info (free, no API key)
• Wolfram Alpha — Computational knowledge engine for factual answers and calculations
• Smart routing — research <topic> searches all sources at once, or use research arxiv, research scholar, research wolfram individually
• Two-phase pipeline — Phase 1 gathers from real research sources ($0), Phase 2 does optional LLM deep analysis

🤖 Super Simple AI Setup

• Just enter your key — setup ai sk-ant-your-key and you're done. Auto-detects Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq
• Or go local — setup ai local auto-installs Ollama, downloads a model, configures SafeClaw
• Model presets — setup ai local small (1.3GB), setup ai local coding, setup ai local writing
• Status check — setup ai status shows what's configured
• Zero config files — No YAML editing needed, the command does it for you

🧠 Smart Input Learning

• Word-to-number — Type "research select one two three" and SafeClaw understands "1 2 3"
• Typo auto-correction — "remaind me" → "remind me", "summerize" → "summarize"
• Shorthand — "tmrw" → "tomorrow", "hrs" → "hours", "mins" → "minutes"
• Auto-learns from mistakes — If a command fails and you retype it correctly, SafeClaw remembers the mapping for next time
• No AI needed — All correct