The Wild Six Weeks for NanoClaw’s Creator That Led to a Deal With Docker
NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen shares his whirlwind six-week journey from viral launch to Docker partnership in this tech world success story.
San Francisco: It’s been a whirlwind for NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen. About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a tiny, open source tool.
The tool is a secure alternative to the popular AI agent-building tool OpenClaw. Cohen built NanoClaw in one weekend when he couldn’t sleep and wanted to fix problems he saw in OpenClaw. His weekend project went viral when he posted it online.
Three weeks ago, an X post from famous AI researcher Andrej Karpathy praised NanoClaw. This post also went viral and brought even more attention to the project. About a week ago, Cohen stopped working on his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw. He launched a company called NanoCo around it.
The Hacker News and Karpathy attention brought 22,000 stars on GitHub and 4,600 forks where people made new versions. Over 50 people have helped improve NanoClaw with updates and more changes are coming.
Now, Cohen has announced a deal with Docker. Docker is the company that invented container technology which NanoClaw uses. The deal will integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw.
Cohen and his brother Lazer started an AI marketing startup a few months ago. The startup offered marketing services like market research and blog posts using AI agents. Their small team was on track to make $1 million in yearly revenue.
Cohen built agents for their startup using Claude Code. Each agent was designed for specific tasks. But something was missing – humans couldn’t pre-schedule work or connect agents to team tools like WhatsApp.
Cohen tried OpenClaw for this missing piece and loved it at first. He realized he needed more agents for different tasks at their company. Then OpenClaw worried him when he found it had downloaded all his WhatsApp messages without permission.
OpenClaw has been called a security nightmare because it accesses memory and account permissions. It’s hard to limit what data it can see once installed. Cohen also found OpenClaw was huge with 800,000 lines of code across many packages.
He saw code from an old project he wrote for editing PDFs using Google’s image tool. He didn’t even know it was there or that he was still maintaining it. So he built his own secure tool in just 500 lines of code based on Apple’s new container technology.
At 4 a.m. one morning, Cohen’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing after Karpathy’s post. Friends told him to start tweeting. He began chatting publicly with the AI researcher, causing even more attention.
Developer Oleg Šelajev from Docker reached out after seeing the buzz. He modified NanoClaw to work with Docker Sandboxes instead of Apple’s technology. Cohen quickly added this to the main project because so many people were now using it.
The Cohens aren’t sure yet how NanoCo will make money. NanoClaw is free and open source and they promise it will always be free. People would hate them if they changed that. They’re living on friends-and-family fundraising right now.
Their plan is to build a paid version with support services. This could include specialists who work directly with client companies to help build and manage secure agents. But this field is very crowded with many other companies doing similar things.
The huge NanoClaw community that Docker has unlocked means we’ll probably hear more about these plans soon.