OpenClaw v2026.5.19-beta.1 Release Summary

Key Changes

Gateway & Performance

• Startup Optimization: Gateway restart latency is reduced by overlapping independent startup work. Plugin services and startup logging now begin before channel startup completes, while still ensuring that sidecars and ACPX probes are awaited before the system is marked as ready.
• ACPX Instrumentation: Startup probe costs are now explicitly attributed in restart traces, providing better visibility into the resource and time costs of ACPX runtime creation and backend registration.
• Restart Benchmarking: A new developer tool, pnpm test:restart:gateway, has been added to provide machine-readable evidence of restart readiness, downtime, and resource slopes.
• Update Check Deferral: The Gateway update check is now deferred until after the system reaches a ready state, preventing update-check scheduling from blocking the critical startup path.

Codex & Agent Runtimes

• Prompt Surface Isolation: To prevent "double-prompting" and conflicting instructions, prompt fragments are now scoped by runtime surface (PI, CLI, ACP, Codex app-server, and subagents). This ensures that native Codex runs only receive OpenClaw-owned routing and delivery guidance rather than layering a second set of PI-style instructions on top of Codex's own base personality.
• Codex App-Server Enhancements:
  • Native code mode is now available without forcing code-mode-only, allowing dynamic tool turns to complete through the app-server bridge.
  • sessions_spawn remains searchable in dynamic tool payloads, but Codex-native spawn_agent is now the primary surface for Codex subagents.
  • Stale childless Codex-native subagent task mirrors are now recoverable and can be cancelled by operators.
• Harness Runtime Loading: The system now loads the selected provider's owner plugin when the Codex harness is selected, fixing issues where models like openai-codex/gpt-5.5-pro failed to resolve due to missing provider hooks.

Channel Integrations

• Telegram:
  • Added support for native DM tool-progress drafts, allowing transient status updates to appear as ephemeral UI rather than persisting in chat history.
  • Fixed a critical issue where delivery-mirror transcript entries were being delivered as final replies, causing the real assistant reply to be replaced by fragmentary content.
  • Improved account management to ensure the implicit default account is preserved even when named accounts are added.
• Discord:
  • Fixed a bug where thread-bound delegated child sessions routed their initial reply to the parent channel instead of the bound thread.
  • Improved realtime voice playback stability for OpenAI backends by prebuffering raw PCM and optimizing noise reduction settings.
• WhatsApp:
  • The forceDocument flag (and asDocument alias) is now honored end-to-end, allowing images and GIFs to be sent as uncompressed documents.
  • upload-file media sends are now lowered into the standard send-media path, preserving hydrated buffers and document semantics.

Memory & Core Infrastructure

• Memory Startup Catch-up: memory-core now performs a startup scan of session transcripts, comparing them against SQLite records to detect and index stale sessions that were updated across a restart boundary.
• QMD Archive Recognition: Memory search now correctly recognizes both dot-form and slug-form archived session transcript paths, preventing archived hits from being dropped by visibility filters.
• CLI Enhancements:
  • Added openclaw sessions list as an alias for openclaw sessions to match the convention of other list-style commands.
  • openclaw infer image describe --file now supports remote HTTP(S) URLs.
  • openclaw skills install/update now supports a --global flag to target the shared ~/.openclaw/skills directory.

Impact

Stability & Reliability

• Session Recovery: Failed per-channel session lanes with missing transcript files are now automatically rotated to fresh session IDs, preventing permanent hangs in Discord-bound agents.
• Auth Fallback: Fixed a loop where openai-codex OAuth recovery would stick to a stale lastGood profile after a refresh_token_reused error.
• Transcript Hygiene: Fixed a bug where cache-ttl handlers caused duplicate assistant-turn emissions, which previously led to verbatim response repetition in long CLI sessions.

Security & Guardrails

• Tool Policy Enforcement: Inline skill tool dispatch now strictly honors the effective tool policy (allow/deny/sandbox) before selecting a target.
• Codex Policy: Deny-all (deny: ["*"]) policies are now strictly honored in the Codex app-server path, disabling native code mode and user MCP projection for restricted runs.
• CI Hardening: Proof verdict markers in CI are now authenticated, accepting markers only from trusted ClawSweeper bot/app comments to prevent forged contributor bypasses.

Upgrade Guide

Breaking Changes & Migration

• Node.js Version: The minimum supported Node.js 22 line has been raised to 22.19. Users on older versions of Node 22 must update their runtime to maintain compatibility.
• Docker/Podman Build Args: A new runtime-neutral build argument, OPENCLAW_IMAGE_APT_PACKAGES, is now preferred for adding extra apt packages to images. OPENCLAW_DOCKER_APT_PACKAGES is maintained as a legacy fallback for backward compatibility.