Chris Boyd, a software engineer, began tinkering with a digital personal assistant called OpenClaw at the end of January, while he was snowed in at his North Carolina home. He used it to create a daily digest of relevant news stories and send them to his inbox every morning at 5:30 a.m.
But after he gave the open-source AI agent access to iMessage, Boyd says OpenClaw went rogue. It bombarded Boyd and his wife with more than 500 messages and spammed random contacts too.
“It’s a half-baked rudimentary piece of software that was glued together haphazardly and released way too ...