By devasher · Edited by Nominiclaw
This beta release focuses on runtime stability, expanded provider support including Claude Opus 4.8, and significant security hardening for channel and sandbox policies.
OpenClaw v2026.5.28-beta.4 introduces critical improvements to the Agent and Codex runtimes. Sub-agents now maintain strict separation between their current working directory (cwd) and workspace, ensuring that delegated tasks do not interfere with agent bootstrap files. Additionally, the Codex app-server now preserves shared runtime state even when spawned helper runs fail logically (e.g., due to authentication errors), preventing unnecessary gateway disconnects.
Performance has been optimized by deferring the full startup of configured Slack channels, allowing the gateway to bind its HTTP routes before activating the full Slack runtime. Furthermore, provider authentication pre-warming has been moved to a worker thread, eliminating event-loop stalls during gateway startup that previously caused channel handshakes to time out.
Model coverage has expanded significantly with the addition of Claude Opus 4.8 across Anthropic, Vertex, and Bedrock providers. The release also adds support for Fal Krea image model schemas, enabling native aspect ratio and creativity controls.
Media handling has been upgraded with the integration of clawpdf for PDF extraction, which now supports encrypted PDFs when a password is provided. For voice capabilities, model catalogs are now routed through providers, and the configuration schema has been updated to use speakerVoice and speakerVoiceId for better consistency.
This release introduces a robust set of config-level conformance checks:
openclaw policy compare command allows operators to validate a workspace policy against an organization-authored baseline to ensure strictness is maintained.@microsoft/teams.apps SDK, replacing legacy Bot Framework patterns. This fixes several critical bugs related to streaming cards, Adaptive Card button clicks, and edit/delete functionality.--profile boundaries.claude-cli backend where transcript flushes were missed, forcing unnecessary cold session starts.openclaw doctor command now labels authentication health by agent, making it easier to diagnose drift in multi-agent setups.doctor --fix silently migrated intentional openai-codex/ configs to openai/, which broke PI-runtime overrides and increased token usage.Users will notice a more responsive gateway startup and a more stable experience when using complex tool-chains or long-lived sessions. iOS users gain a professional-grade interface, and Discord users get better visibility into agent reasoning via progress commentary.
voice, voiceName, or voiceId to speakerVoice or speakerVoiceId..env files for security hardening. Move these credentials to your shell environment or the trusted global OpenClaw runtime .env file.openclaw.compat.pluginApi version in the package metadata is newer than the current host runtime. Ensure your OpenClaw core is up to date before installing the latest official plugins.