(2026-03-13) The Wild Six Weeks For Nanoclaws Creator That Led To A Deal With Docker

The wild six weeks for NanoClaw’s creator that led to a deal with Docker 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, secure alternative to the AI agent-building sensation [OpenClaw]

About three weeks ago, an X post praising NanoClaw from famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy went viral

Now, on Friday, Cohen announced a deal with Docker — the company that essentially invented the container technology NanoClaw is built on, and counts millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers — to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw.

It all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago

“It was going really well, great traction. I’m a huge believer in that business model of AI-native service companies that have margins and operate like a software company but are actually providing services,” said Cohen

He had built the agents the startup was using, largely using Claude Code

The agent could do work when prompted, but the humans couldn’t pre-schedule work, or connect agents to team communication tools like WhatsApp and assign tasks that way

Cohen heard about OpenClaw, the popular AI agent tool whose creator now works for OpenAI. Cohen used it to build out those final interfaces, and loved it.

But then OpenClaw scared the bejesus out of him.
In researching a hiccup with performance, he stumbled across a file where the OpenClaw agent had downloaded all of his WhatsApp messages and stored them in plain, unencrypted text on his computer. Not just the work-related messages it was given explicit access to, but all of them, his personal messages too.

That issue will likely improve over time, given the project’s popularity, but Cohen had another concern: the sheer size of OpenClaw. As he researched security options for it, he saw all the packages that had been bundled into it.

He realized there was no way for him to validate all OpenClaw’s code and its dependencies, which, by some estimates, sprawled across 800,000 lines of code.

So he built his own in just 500 lines of code, intended to be used for his company, and shared it. He based it on Apple’s new container tech, which creates isolated environments that prevent software from accessing any data on a machine beyond what it is explicitly authorized to use

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 NanoClaw project

There are thousands of people using it. Yeah, I said, I’m going to move over to the standard

one area still needs to be figured out: how NanoCo will make money

Currently the Cohens are living on a friends-and-family fundraising round, they said.

The game plan is to build a fully supported commercial product with services including so-called forward-deployed engineers — specialists embedded directly with client companies to help them build and manage their systems

That is, however, a crowded field growing more crowded by the hour.