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The recent rebrand of the popular open-source AI assistant ClawdBot to Moltbot has sparked chaos in the crypto world.
Scammers have launched a flood of impersonation tokens to exploit trader confusion. ClawdBot, created by developer Peter Steinberger, went viral earlier this year as a powerful local AI agent built around Anthropic’s Claude models. It quickly amassed tens of thousands of GitHub stars for enabling autonomous tasks like email management, coding, and more.
However, the name “ClawdBot” (and its shorthand “Clawd”) drew a trademark challenge from Anthropic over similarities to “Claude.” This forced a swift rebrand to Moltbot in late January 2026.
The rushed name change created a critical vulnerability. During the brief window when old social handles (on X and GitHub) were transitioned or left inactive, opportunistic scammers hijacked them almost immediately. Some reports suggest this happened within seconds or minutes.
These impersonated accounts were then used to promote fake meme coins falsely tied to the project. The most prominent fake token, $CLAWD (on Solana), pumped rapidly amid the hype and FOMO from retail traders. It briefly reached a market cap of around $16 million with high trading volume on meme coin platforms. Traders, mistaking the promoted token for an official tie-in to the viral AI tool, poured in funds. The price then crashed over 90% shortly after.
Steinberger quickly issued strong public warnings on X, stating clearly: “I will never do a coin. Any project that lists me as coin owner is a SCAM.” He emphasized that the project has no official cryptocurrency involvement and urged the community to avoid all such tokens.
To all crypto folks:
Please stop pinging me, stop harassing me.
I will never do a coin.
Any project that lists me as coin owner is a SCAM.
No, I will not accept fees.
You are actively damanging the project.— Peter Steinberger 🦞 (@steipete) January 27, 2026
This incident highlights classic risks of meme coin speculation. Trademark disputes can create exploitable chaos, impersonation spreads fast on social platforms, and hype-driven trading often leads to sharp losses for late entrants. The Moltbot team has since worked to reclaim accounts and clarify the situation.