OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent platform innovating personal and automated workflows, announced a strategic partnership with VirusTotal, the world’s leading threat intelligence platform, to bring advanced security scanning capabilities to its ClawHub skill marketplace. This collaboration is designed to enhance safety and trust for developers and users by automatically vetting skills for malicious activity before they become available for download.
OpenClaw’s ClawHub marketplace enables a vibrant ecosystem of independently developed skills that extend the capabilities of AI agents — from smart home control to workflow automation. As the ecosystem has grown, so too has the risk that unvetted code could expose users to unauthorized actions, data exfiltration, or other security threats.
“Our integration with VirusTotal marks an important step in securing the AI agent ecosystem,” said Peter Steinberger, co-founder of OpenClaw. “All skills published to ClawHub are now scanned using VirusTotal’s threat intelligence, including their new Code Insight capability. This provides an additional layer of security for the OpenClaw community.”
Under the new process, each skill uploaded to ClawHub is bundled into a deterministic package and hashed with a SHA-256 fingerprint. This fingerprint is cross-referenced with VirusTotal’s extensive threat intelligence database. If no prior analysis exists, the skill bundle is submitted to VirusTotal’s Code Insight engine, which evaluates the behavioral characteristics of the code including network operations, external downloads, and access to sensitive data to determine whether it is benign, suspicious, or malicious.
Also Read: Rubrik Appoints Jesse Green as Chief Revenue Officer
Skills that receive a “benign” verdict are approved automatically for distribution. Skills flagged as suspicious trigger warnings to users, while those determined to contain malicious content are blocked from download outright. In addition, OpenClaw now conducts daily re-scans of all active skills to detect newly emergent threats.
“VirusTotal already protects the Hugging Face ecosystem using hash-based lookups against their threat intelligence database. Our integration goes further — we upload full skill bundles for Code Insight analysis, giving the AI a complete picture of the skill’s behavior rather than just matching known signatures,” the OpenClaw team explained in their announcement.
While emphasizing that no single security measure is a complete solution, OpenClaw noted that this partnership adds a critical layer of defense in an evolving threat landscape. “Let’s be clear: this is not a silver bullet. VirusTotal scanning won’t catch everything,” the company said, underscoring that behavioral analysis and threat intelligence help mitigate known malware risks.
As part of a broader security initiative, OpenClaw also plans to publish a comprehensive threat model, a public security roadmap, and details on its full codebase audit. Jamieson O’Reilly, founder of Dvuln and co-founder of Aether AI, has joined as lead security advisor to guide these efforts.
“We’re committed to making OpenClaw the most secure AI agent platform available,” the announcement concluded. “This is the beginning, not the end.”
Source: OpenClaw