OpenClaw v2026.5.16-beta.7 Release Summary

Key Changes

Gateway & Performance

• Startup Optimization: Gateway restart latency is reduced by overlapping independent startup work. Plugin services now start earlier, and startup logging overlaps with sidecar startup, while still ensuring the /readyz sidecar gating remains intact.
• ACPX Instrumentation: Startup probe costs for ACPX are now explicitly attributed in restart traces, providing better visibility into resource-count costs without altering readiness behavior.
• Protocol Diagnostics: Improved Gateway protocol-mismatch diagnostics now include client protocol ranges and peer context, helping operators identify stale client processes after rollbacks.

Agents & Codex

• Codex Session Isolation: Fixed a critical issue where concurrent Codex turns for different agents could abort in-flight turns. Bound Codex app-server conversations now preserve the owning agent directory, ensuring follow-up turns and controls are routed through the correct agent runtime.
• Context Budgeting: Introduced guards for Codex app-server context budgets. The system now rotates stale bindings when native rollouts exceed 70k tokens and caps dynamic tool text results to prevent oversized context from surviving compaction.
• Subagent Reliability:
  • Completion announcements now wait for queued steering to reach the parent transcript before marking them as "announced," preventing false delivery reports.
  • Successful keep-mode subagent completions that fail delivery after retries are now suspended rather than terminally cleaned up, preserving the final payload for later recovery.
• Tool Policy Enforcement: Inline skill tool dispatch now honors the full effective tool policy pipeline, ensuring that denied tools are filtered out before execution.

Integrations & Channels

• Telegram Enhancements:
  • Security: Verbose raw-update logging now redacts private user/chat identifiers, names, and message text to prevent sensitive data leaks in logs.
  • Reliability: Fixed a bug where config hot-reloads could wedge isolated polling ingress workers. The system now treats reload stops as recovery events rather than manual stops.
  • Media Groups: Added user-visible warnings when photos in a media group fail to download, preventing silent image loss.
  • Context Preservation: Telegram reply chains now better preserve bot message context, including media metadata, when users reply to bot responses.
• xAI Integration: Fully resolved OAuth login failures and fixed video generation routing. OAuth profiles now grant access to TTS, STT, and video generation, and the User-Agent is now correctly withheld when using custom proxies.
• WhatsApp: The forceDocument flag is now honored end-to-end, allowing images and GIFs to be sent as uncompressed documents.
• Feishu: Subagent spawning now returns the bound conversation delivery origin, enabling direct initial child run delivery.

CLI & Infrastructure

• Performance: The openclaw models command is now up to 72% faster in large plugin installations by reusing a metadata snapshot instead of repeatedly scanning the plugin registry.
• Developer Experience:
  • Added defineToolPlugin and new CLI commands (build, validate, init) for typed simple tool plugins.
  • PowerShell completion onboarding now provides concrete profile paths and runnable reload commands.
• Docker/Podman: Introduced OPENCLAW_IMAGE_APT_PACKAGES as a runtime-neutral build argument for adding extra apt packages, while maintaining legacy support for OPENCLAW_DOCKER_APT_PACKAGES.

Memory & QA

• Memory Core: Added a startup catch-up scan for session sources to ensure indexing doesn't fall behind after gateway restarts. Vector degradation warnings now correctly distinguish between sqlite-vec load failures and missing embedding providers.
• QA-Lab: Expanded runtime parity scenarios, added tool fixture coverage reporting, and implemented hard-gates for dynamic runtime-tool drift in release checks.

Impact

Fixed Issues

• #83008: Telegram ingress worker exit code 1 on stop wedged channels during hot reload.
• #82954: Cross-agent Codex app-server aborts caused by shared client state.
• #82911: Message tool routed to webchat due to stale context in non-webchat sessions.
• #82944: Telegram raw-update logs leaked private chat payloads.
• #82841: Protocol mismatch spam after rollback due to stale local clients.
• #82341: Memory indexing fell behind across gateway restarts.
• #82986: Chrome CDP launch failed intermittently on macOS cold starts despite readiness.

User Experience

Users will notice faster CLI responses for model listings, more reliable subagent completions, and a more secure logging environment for Telegram. Android users will now be prompted to accept new TLS thumbprints during Gateway certificate rotations instead of experiencing hard connection failures.

Upgrade Guide

Breaking Changes & Migrations

• Node.js Requirement: The minimum supported Node.js 22 line has been raised to 22.19.
• Dependency Updates: @openclaw/proxyline has been updated to 0.3.3 and Pi packages to 0.75.1.
• Codex OAuth Profiles: Legacy Codex OAuth profiles using oauthRef sidecars remain usable. However, refreshing these profiles will now migrate the credentials inline. Users can explicitly migrate all profiles using openclaw doctor --fix.