One Developer Just Built the Marketing Assistant Big Tech Couldn't
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
I didn’t want to write about this topic. (I know, it’s a strange way to start a newsletter, but here we are.)
Clawdbot Moltbot (renamed an hour ago after a trademark warning from Anthropic) isn’t a marketing tool. It’s not an ad platform, a creative suite, or an analytics dashboard. It’s an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own computer and talks to you through WhatsApp or Telegram. Not exactly the stuff of marketing newsletters. But now for a week, every AI-focused Discord, every Twitter thread, every AI community I lurk in has been consumed by this one project.
When something captures that much attention that quickly, it usually means something is shifting underneath. This is the kind of story that will be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal by the weekend. Well, you’re hearing about it here first.
Moltbot is the work of one person. Peter Steinberger, an independent developer in Vienna, built it a few weeks ago and gave it away for free. No company behind it. No enter…