The journey for NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen has been a whirlwind. About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a tiny, open source, secure alternative to the AI agent-building sensation OpenClaw, after building it in a weekend coding binge. That post went viral. Cohen described sitting on the couch in his sweatpants and melting into the project for almost 48 hours straight.
About three weeks ago, an X post praising NanoClaw from famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy also went viral. Then, about a week ago, Cohen closed down his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launch a company around it called NanoCo. The attention from Hacker News and Karpathy translated into 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks, and over 50 contributors. Cohen has already added hundreds of updates to the project with hundreds more in the queue.
Now, Cohen has announced a deal with Docker to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw. Docker essentially invented the container technology NanoClaw is built on and counts millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers.
This all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago. The startup offered marketing services through a small team using AI agents and was on track to hit one million dollars in annual recurring revenue. Cohen, a computer programmer who previously worked for Wix, had built the agents using Claude Code, but felt a piece was missing for pre-scheduling work and connecting to tools like WhatsApp.
He heard about OpenClaw and used it to build those final interfaces, experiencing a big aha moment. But then OpenClaw scared him. While researching a performance hiccup, he found a file where the OpenClaw agent had downloaded all of his WhatsApp messages, personal and work-related, storing them in plain, unencrypted text on his computer. OpenClaw has been widely criticized as a security nightmare due to how it accesses memory and account permissions.
Cohen had a further concern about OpenClaw’s sheer size. While researching security options, he saw it included an obscure open source project he himself had written months earlier, which he was no longer maintaining. He realized there was no way to validate all of OpenClaw’s code and its sprawling dependencies. So he built his own alternative in just 500 lines of code, intended for his company, and shared it. He based it on Apple’s new container tech, which creates isolated environments that prevent unauthorized data access.
At 4 a.m., a couple of weeks after sharing it on Hacker News, his phone started ringing non-stop. A friend had seen Karpathy’s post and urged Cohen to start tweeting, setting off a public discussion with the well-known AI researcher. Attention to NanoClaw followed like a landslide, with more tweets, YouTube reviews from programmers, and news stories. A domain squatter even snagged a NanoClaw website URL.
Then Oleg Šelajev, a developer who works for Docker, reached out. Šelajev saw the buzz and modified NanoClaw to replace Apple’s container technology with Docker’s competing alternative, Sandboxes. Cohen had no hesitation about pushing out support for Sandboxes as part of the main project, recognizing the tool now had a community of thousands of users and should move to the standard.
For all the changes these weeks have brought Cohen and his brother Lazer, now CEO and president of NanoCo respectively, one area still needs to be figured out: how NanoCo will make money. NanoClaw is free and open source and the Cohens vow it always will be. They are currently living on a friends-and-family fundraising round.
While cautious about announcing commercial plans, as they haven’t fully formulated them, they say VCs are already calling. The game plan is to build a fully supported commercial product with services including forward-deployed engineers embedded with client companies to help build and manage secure AI agent systems. This is a crowded field, but given the giant community of developers NanoClaw just unlocked with Docker, we are sure to hear more about this soon.
Pictured above from left to right are Lazer and Gavriel Cohen.