Sally O’Malley, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, recently unveiled Tank OS, a new open-source tool designed to streamline the deployment and enhance the secure management of OpenClaw agents.
Speaking to TechCrunch, O’Malley described the initiative as “a fun project that I put together on the weekend that I knew would be a really good fit for AI and where we’re going,” expressing her desire to make the tool accessible “to the masses.”
Tank OS is specifically developed for power users who wish to operate OpenClaw on personal machines, as well as for IT professionals overseeing extensive fleets of corporate OpenClaw agents. Its core function is to facilitate safer and more efficient large-scale maintenance of OpenClaw.
The open-source OpenClaw project, which deploys an AI agent onto a local computer, has already inspired numerous individuals, companies, and startups to innovate improved operational methods. Concurrently, a rising number of startups are developing competitive "claw" alternatives, such as NanoClaw, which they claim offer enhanced safety features.
O’Malley’s contribution stands out due to her role as an OpenClaw maintainer. This position places her among a select group of software engineers who collaborate with creator Peter Steinberger to prioritize feature development and bug fixes. Her specific focus involves optimizing OpenClaw for enterprise environments and ensuring its seamless integration with Red Hat’s diverse Linux operating system distributions. (It's worth noting that Peter Steinberger continues to lead the independent open-source OpenClaw project, despite his employment with OpenAI.)
O’Malley’s motivation for joining OpenClaw stems from her vision to “enable everyone to run AI in a safe way, that’s open,” as she articulated.
Anticipating the potential challenges of OpenClaw’s widespread adoption within enterprise settings, O’Malley decided to develop a specialized tool to address this future scenario. Her development journey began with Podman, an open-source containerization tool pioneered by a Red Hat colleague. Containers provide a method for isolating applications from the host operating system, bundling all necessary components for execution. This enables, for example, a Linux application to run efficiently on Windows or Mac systems.
According to Red Hat, Podman offers a uniquely secure approach to containerization due to its "rootless" nature, which prevents containers from inheriting any elevated privileges from the host machine.
Tank OS functions by loading OpenClaw into a Podman container on Red Hat’s Fedora Linux OS and subsequently transforming this container into a bootable image. This innovative feature ensures that OpenClaw automatically runs and launches upon computer startup.
The tool incorporates all essential components required for OpenClaw to operate effectively without constant human intervention, including "state" for memory retention, secure storage for API keys (critical for accessing subscriptions and services), and various other functionalities.
Users are empowered to run multiple Tank OS instances concurrently on a single machine to execute diverse tasks. A key security benefit is the strict isolation, ensuring that passwords or credentials are never shared between instances, and no single OpenClaw instance can access other processes running on the computer.
While acknowledging the ongoing efforts within the OpenClaw project to enhance agent safety, O’Malley cautions that it is “an incredibly powerful application” that can also be “dangerous” if not configured correctly. She emphasized, “It’s not a tool that you can use easily unless you do have some sort of technical experience.”
Illustrating these risks, numerous accounts detail incidents such as a Meta AI security researcher’s Claw agent inadvertently deleting her work emails, or another agent downloading a user’s WhatsApp DMs in plain text. Furthermore, there is a discernible increase in malware specifically targeting OpenClaw users.
O’Malley clarified that Tank OS is not intended for technological novices, stating that users should possess a comfort level with installing and maintaining software on their computers. She also noted that Tank OS is not the sole OpenClaw implementation leveraging container technology; NanoClaw, for example, offers a similar approach in partnership with the prominent container company Docker.
Ultimately, Tank OS is positioned to be particularly valuable for IT professionals—a key demographic for Red Hat—who anticipate managing extensive fleets of OpenClaw agents across corporate networks. The tool enables these professionals to update OpenClaw agents using the same established methodologies they already employ for other containerized applications.
Reflecting on her involvement, O’Malley stated, “My role within OpenClaw is really my interest in it,” particularly in envisioning “how it’s going to look scaled out when there are millions of these autonomous agents talking to one another.”
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