OpenClaw Star Breaks 300k Rushes into GitHub Top 10: From Weekend Project to Open Source's Fastest-Growing Ever in Under Half a Year

According to 1M AI News monitoring, OpenClaw's GitHub stars have surpassed 300,000 (approximately 308,000 as of March 13), ranking 9th on GitHub's overall stars leaderboard, just below long-standing learning resource projects like build-your-own-x, awesome, and freeCodeCamp. For comparison, Facebook's React, accumulated over a decade, has 244,000 stars, and the Linux kernel, spanning over 30 years, has 222,000 stars.

OpenClaw, originally named Clawdbot, was open-sourced by Peter Steinberger as a weekend project in November 2025, remaining obscure for months after its release. The project suddenly gained popularity on January 26 this year, receiving 9,000 stars on the same day, 60,000 stars in three days, surpassing 100,000 stars in a week, and reaching 190,000 stars in two weeks. The next day, due to a trademark request from Anthropic, it underwent two renaming iterations before settling on OpenClaw. By the end of February, the project had surpassed the Linux kernel, and in early March, it surpassed React, achieving what others took over a decade in less than two months. The project now has 1,177 contributors and 58,000 forks. The eight projects currently ahead of OpenClaw are all static resource collections such as knowledge bases, tutorial lists, or learning paths, making OpenClaw the only active software project in the top 10.