A Molted Lobster, a Deal with OpenAI, and the Most Expensive Branding Lesson You'll Never Learn From
Peter Steinberger just announced he's joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone, and the OpenClaw project he built is moving to a foundation to stay open and independent. It went from a solo developer's open-source experiment to one of the biggest stories in AI in a matter of weeks. Congratulations to him. Genuinely. That is a spectacular outcome by any measure.
It is also, for the rest of us, a masterclass in how not to name a company, and a reminder that surviving your own branding mistakes is the exception, not the rule.
Names Don't Describe. They Distinguish.
This is the most counterintuitive thing founders get wrong, and it's the thing I spend more time explaining than almost anything else in a brand counseling session.
When you name a product or a company, you are not writing a description of what it does. You are creating a signal: something that points to you and only you, something that separates you from everyone else in the room. The moment your name starts doing the job of a description, it stops doing the job of a name.
Don Draper said it better than I can: "Success comes from standing out, not fitting in."
Descriptive names blend in. That's their job. And if it's descriptive, it's not a name.
The MVD Pronto Problem (Why You're Paying for Everyone Else's Marketing)
Drive around any mid-sized city in a state that permits private motor vehicle service companies. You'll find a half-dozen storefronts competing for the same registration renewal and license business. Every single one of them is named some variation of Quick MVD, Fast DMV, Express MVD, EZ DMV.
I have watched customers walk into the wrong one. I have watched people argue about which one they used last time. I have personally seen someone try to describe one of these businesses to its own owner and use a competitor's name. The owner didn't even blink, because it happens constantly.
If your name is so similar to your competitors that customers can't remember the difference, every dollar you spend on marketing goes into a shared pool, if you're lucky. You're not building your brand. You're building awareness for the category, and everyone in the category gets to enjoy it. You are, in effect, advertising for your competition.
This is not a "small" business problem. It scales. Badly.
Eighty Platforms, Few Names
I work at the intersection of law and technology. Right now, if you go looking for AI tools built specifically for lawyers, you will find more than eighty platforms vying for attention and wallet share from the same pool of overworked, skeptical attorneys.
A remarkable number of them are named some combination or variation of jagon that sounds like: Lawyer.ai, LegalBot, AgenticJD, AI Esquire, RoboCounselor, and Juris+AI (to generalize a few).
Every one of those names is telling the customer what it is, not who it is. Every one of those names shares phonetic and semantic space with every other name in the category. And every one of those founders is wondering why awareness is so hard to build. It's not hard to build. You're just building it for everyone. Do think your investors notice?
The Claw Problem
Back to OpenClaw. The name history is even richer than most people know, and it reads like a case study I could hand to a first-year associate.
The project launched in November 2025 as Clawdbot, a deliberate lobster-themed pun on Anthropic's Claude AI. That detail matters. This was not an accidental similarity. Steinberger knew what he was doing and leaned into it. It was clever. It was also a problem waiting to happen.
Clawdbot. The dominant element is claw, derived directly from Claude. The suffix bot tells a customer approximately nothing. Every automation tool, every AI assistant, every chatbot on the market has some variation of bot in its name or branding. You cannot own it. It differentiates nothing. And the base word, said aloud at a conference, in a hallway, over the phone, is phonetically indistinguishable from one of the largest AI foundation models on the planet.
In January 2026, Anthropic reached out by email. No lawyers, no cease-and-desist letter. As Steinberger later described it: "They didn't send their lawyers. They sent someone internally. Kudos, they were really nice." He complied immediately. Good move Peter.
That is about as graceful as this situation ever gets. And it is still a forced rename of a viral project with tens of thousands of GitHub stars, executed under pressure, with no runway to think it through. If you thing the hard dollars of rebranding is expensive, wait till you pay to reaquire the customers you already earned.
Moltbot. The pivot to Moltbot was conceptually clever. Lobsters molt their shells to grow; the metaphor for an evolving AI agent is right there. Steinberger even framed it as "same lobster soul, new shell." But a name that requires that much explanation has already failed its primary job. The rebrand day was, in Steinberger's own words, a situation where "everything that could have gone wrong today went wrong." The X handle was immediately snapped up by crypto scammers. Impersonation campaigns launched under the old name. Fake tokens appeared. Rapid rebranding is not free. The costs are just harder to put on an invoice.
OpenClaw. Three days after Moltbot, Steinberger announced the final name, saying Moltbot "never quite rolled off the tongue." Open is everywhere. Open source. Open architecture. OpenAI. It is a modifier that developers understand and everyone else ignores. It adds nothing distinctive to the brand and borrows heavily from a name, OpenAI, that Steinberger is now literally working for.
The dominant element, after all the stripping away, is still Claw.
The One Thing They Got Right
The lobster.
I'll be honest: I cannot draw a clean line from crustacean to agentic AI infrastructure. But I don't need to. That's the point. A lobster is 100% distinctive for a tech company. Nobody else is using it. Nobody is going to confuse it with a competitor. It is weird and memorable and it sticks.
If the visual identity had been a robot, a circuit board, a brain, or any other "AI company" visual cliché, we wouldn't even be talking about it. The lobster is the one moment in this brand's history where someone zigged when everything else zagged.
What I Would Have Done
Had a founder come to me before launch with this name, and they often do, here's how that conversation goes:
I have a couple of custom AI tools I use to help organize the threshold analysis: searching for phonetic confusion risks, pulling trademark availability, flagging descriptive terms that won't hold up. My tool and research would have flagged claw/Claude as a potential confusion risk almost immediately.
But that part is increasingly table stakes. The part that still requires a lawyer, the part that machines genuinely have a hard time replicating, is what comes next.
You sit across from the founder. You tell them something they don't want to hear. You explain that the name they have fallen in love with, the name they've been using internally for six months, the name on the pitch deck they showed to investors, is working against them. You show them why. And then you help them find a better one.
Most founders, when they hear it framed honestly and specifically, are grateful. They came in defensive and they leave relieved. A few ignore the advice. Those are usually the ones who come back later, when the company has grown, when a cease-and-desist arrives, when they're raising a Series B and due diligence surfaces the problem, and the fix is considerably more expensive than it would have been at the start.
Peter Steinberger is a genuinely talented developer who built something remarkable and moved fast enough that none of the branding problems caught up with him. If you are one of the very few who, in a matter of months, builds something so singular that it captures virtually all the attention from a small but intensely relevant community, you have room to make a lot of branding mistakes. That is a rare thing. For the rest of us building companies that have to win in the market over years rather than weeks, the name you choose on day one is an asset or a liability. There is no neutral.
Seth Gardenswartz is the founder of Blackgarden Law, a corporate, finance, and IP practice. He counsels clients on brand strategy, trademark clearance, and technology transactions.