OpenClaw v2026.5.12-beta.1 Release Summary

Key Changes

Plugin SDK & Workflow Orchestration

OpenClaw has significantly expanded its Plugin SDK to support complex, host-mediated workflows. A new session-action Gateway seam allows plugins to register typed actions that can be invoked through the host, ensuring that action IDs, parameters, and results are validated against strict schemas. This prevents malformed plugin data from crashing the Gateway or leaking arbitrary payloads.

Additionally, the SDK now supports:

• Scheduled Session Turns: Plugins can now schedule future session turns through the existing cron-compatible host scheduler.
• Outbound Attachments: A new helper allows plugins to send session-bound attachments via host-owned delivery.
• Finalize Retry: Plugins can now request bounded retries before a reply is finalized, allowing for automated repair of agent responses.

Memory & Context Management

To prevent unbounded growth of MEMORY.md files during "dreaming" promotions, a new bounded compaction step has been introduced. The system now drops the oldest auto-promoted sections by date to keep the file size under a default budget of 10,000 characters, while ensuring that user-authored content is preserved unconditionally.

Other memory improvements include:

• Corpus Labeling: memory_search now correctly labels session transcript hits as corpus: "sessions" instead of flattening them to corpus: "memory".
• Symlink Protection: The system now rejects symlinked directory components in configured extra memory paths to prevent unauthorized path traversal.

Channel & Integration Updates

• Slack: Added allowBots: "mentions" mode for parity with Discord, ensuring only bot messages that explicitly mention the bot are processed. Formatting hints for Slack's mrkdwn syntax have also been added to the system prompt to prevent rendering issues with standard Markdown.
• Telegram: Fixed a bug where .mp4 files sent with --force-document were still routed through sendVideo, which often caused network failures. Additionally, the native /status and /think menus now correctly resolve and display model thinking defaults.
• iMessage: Documentation has been updated to announce the migration from BlueBubbles to the native imsg path.
• Matrix: Markdown tables now default to bullet lists instead of fenced code blocks, improving readability across various Matrix clients.

Gateway & Runtime Performance

• Streaming Optimization: The Gateway now caches broadcast frame fragments for streaming events, reducing redundant JSON serialization for multiple WebSocket recipients.
• Session Resolution: sessions.resolve now scopes store loads to the requested agent, preventing OOM crashes caused by loading all agent session stores simultaneously.
• Fly.io Support: The runtime now detects Fly Machines as container environments, ensuring Bonjour auto-disables and Gateway bind defaults are correct.

Impact

Fixed Issues

• #51264 (OOM Crash): Resolved heap exhaustion by scoping session store loads to specific agents.
• #73691 (Gateway Freeze): Prevented Gateway freezes caused by oversized MEMORY.md files through automated compaction.
• #79284 (Orphaned Processes): Fixed a bug where subagent compaction caused the loss of active exec process references.
• #80389 (Telegram Video Failure): Ensured --force-document correctly routes videos through sendDocument to avoid compression and API errors.
• #75379 (TUI Hang): Fixed a critical issue where the TUI became unresponsive to Ctrl+C after a gateway disconnect.

Technical Improvements

• Build System: Upgraded the workspace to pnpm 11, aligning project settings and build allowlists in pnpm-workspace.yaml.
• Node.js 26: Cleaned up deprecation warnings by replacing tsx preloads with native type stripping (--experimental-strip-types).
• Codex Integration: Native Codex subagents are now mirrored into the Task Registry, providing better visibility into subagent lifecycles via tasks list.

Upgrade Guide

Breaking Changes & Migration

• pnpm Upgrade: Users building from source must upgrade to pnpm 11. Project settings have moved from package.json to pnpm-workspace.yaml.
• Memory Compaction: Users with dreaming.enabled: true may notice a one-time compaction of their MEMORY.md file upon the first run of this version if the file exceeds 10,000 characters. Only auto-promoted sections are removed; manual notes are safe.
• GitHub CLI Auth: If using the GitHub skill in a service environment (e.g., systemd) where the HOME directory differs from the user who authenticated gh, operators should now set the GH_CONFIG_DIR environment variable to the path of the authenticated config (e.g., /root/.config/gh).