"The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It’s an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It’s two months old, has over 114,000 stars on GitHub and is seeing incredible adoption, especially given the friction involved in setting it up. (Given the inherent risk of prompt injection against this class of software it’s my current pick for most likely to result in a Challenger disaster, but I’m going to put that aside for the moment.) OpenClaw is built around skills, and the community around it are sharing thousands of these on clawhub.ai. A skill is a zip file containing markdown instructions and optional extra scripts (and yes, they can steal your crypto) which means they act as a powerful plugin system for OpenClaw. Moltbook is a wildly creative new site that bootstraps itself using skills." https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/moltbook/

"The Trump administration is preparing to use private military contractors to protect oil and energy assets in Venezuela rather than deploying US troops, according to two sources familiar with the plans, setting up a potential boon for security firms with experience in the region and ties to the administration. While President Trump hasn’t ruled out a possible US military presence in Venezuela, sources close to the president say he’s wary of putting American boots on the ground for an extended period of time. That raises a potential problem for the White House following the US capture of Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro. As it lobbies major oil companies to reinvest in Venezuela’s ailing oil industry, the administration must convince them it can provide the kind of security they will need to operate safely there — not just for months but years." https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/15/politics/trump-private-contractors-venezuela-oil #USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #MilitaryContractors #Imperialism