openclaw v2026.6.5-beta.2 release notes: what's new & changelog

openclaw v2026.6.5-beta.2 delivers a new bundled web-search provider, expanded channel capabilities for Matrix and QQBot, and significant reliability improvements for agent session recovery and MCP tool integration.

Key Changes

New Bundled Web-Search Provider: Parallel

Parallel is now integrated as a bundled web_search provider, offering LLM-optimized dense excerpts designed for agentic loops. It authenticates via PARALLEL_API_KEY (or plugins.entries.parallel.config.webSearch.apiKey) and hits the api.parallel.ai/v1/search endpoint. The provider includes built-in support for session IDs and cache-safe handling to maintain consistency across search tasks.

Channel Enhancements

• Matrix: Now supports inbound audio preflight, allowing voice notes to be transcribed before passing through mention gates. Additionally, thread-aware read and reply behavior has been implemented, ensuring room reads exclude thread traffic and replies preserve Matrix fallback metadata.
• QQBot: Implements a sanitizeText hook to strip model reasoning and thinking scaffolding (e.g., <thinking> blocks) before delivery, preventing internal model narration from leaking into channel replies.
• Feishu: Fixed streaming-card updates to send cumulative visible markdown instead of suffix-only content, ensuring the full reply text is preserved in the CardKit content element.
• WhatsApp: Connection startup waits are now bounded by the configured socket timeout to prevent infinite hangs during startup. Additionally, the channel now restarts on hot config reload when per-account enabled status changes, ensuring disabled accounts are properly torn down.

Agent and Session Reliability

• Anthropic Extended Thinking: Sessions now recover after prompt-cache expiry or Gateway restarts. This is achieved by deferring the stream start event until after message_start, allowing pre-generation signature errors to trigger existing recovery retries.
• MCP Tool Results: To prevent Anthropic 400 errors and poisoned session history, non-text/image MCP tool-result blocks (such as resource_link, resource, and audio) are now coerced to text at the materialize boundary.
• Stall Detection: Added detection for unsigned thinking-only stalls. If a model produces only a thinking block with no visible text and a stopReason="stop", the system now triggers a reasoning-only retry or surfaces an incomplete-turn error instead of stalling indefinitely.

Platform and Infrastructure

• Auth Storage: Auth profiles and runtime state have been migrated from JSON files to SQLite (openclaw-agent.sqlite) for improved durability. Legacy JSON stores are automatically migrated during the doctor config preflight.
• Gateway Security: The agent-facing gateway config mutation allowlist has been tightened; agents can no longer persistently rewrite global prompt overlays or the global default model.
• Podman Support: Dockerfile base image references are now fully qualified (e.g., docker.io/library/node) to prevent hangs on Podman hosts with short-name-mode = "enforcing".
• ClawHub Skills: Users can now install GitHub-backed ClawHub skills, which are resolved via the install API and downloaded as pinned GitHub commits.

Impact

For Developers and Operators

• Security Hardening: The restriction on global config mutations reduces the risk of agents accidentally or maliciously altering system-wide defaults. MCP HTTP redirects are now routed through the shared SSRF guard, ensuring redirect targets are checked per hop.
• Improved DX: The migration of auth profiles to SQLite and the auto-migration of legacy cron stores reduce manual maintenance and state corruption risks during upgrades.

For End Users

• Reduced Noise: QQBot users will no longer see raw thinking tags in their replies.
• Better Stability: Users of Anthropic extended-thinking models will experience fewer permanent session failures after gateway restarts or cache timeouts.
• Enhanced Search: The addition of Parallel provides a high-accuracy, agent-optimized alternative to existing web-search providers.

FAQ

What's new in v2026.6.5-beta.2?

This release introduces Parallel as a bundled web-search provider, adds voice preflight and thread support for Matrix, moves auth profiles to SQLite, and includes critical fixes for Anthropic session recovery and MCP tool result coercion.

Are there any breaking changes?

No breaking changes are reported, though agent-driven gateway config.patch and gateway config.apply calls targeting global prompt overlays or global default model settings will now fail as protected config changes.

How do I upgrade?

Upgrade via your standard package manager or deployment process; legacy cron JSON stores and auth profiles will be automatically migrated to SQLite during the doctor config preflight.