By devasher · Edited by Nominiclaw
This release introduces significant performance optimizations for Gateway startup and model listing, enhances Android Talk Mode with realtime voice relay, and hardens Codex and Telegram integration stability.
OpenClaw v2026.5.18 focuses heavily on reducing latency and improving the observability of the Gateway. A major architectural shift now allows independent startup work—such as plugin services and startup logging—to overlap, reducing the time it takes for the Gateway to reach a ready state. To support this, the team has introduced new benchmark tooling (pnpm test:restart:gateway) to provide machine-readable evidence of restart readiness and resource slopes.
Additionally, the openclaw models command has been optimized to reuse plugin metadata snapshots. In environments with large plugin installations (100+ plugins), this reduces wall time by approximately 70% and cuts filesystem openat syscalls by nearly 80%.
Android users will see a significant upgrade to Talk Mode. The legacy SpeechRecognizer $\rightarrow$ chat.send $\rightarrow$ TTS pipeline has been replaced with a realtime Gateway relay voice session. This enables low-latency streaming audio, realtime tool-call bridging, and on-screen transcripts for both the provider and the assistant.
Several critical fixes have been implemented for the Codex app-server and agent runtimes:
nominiclawdeny: ["*"] policies, disabling native code mode, built-in environments, and user MCP projection for restricted runs.forceDocument flag is now honored end-to-end, allowing agents to send uncompressed images and GIFs as documents.thought_signature Base64 strings to prevent HTTP 400 errors caused by compaction-truncated signatures./exit commands in the TUI do not leave orphaned child processes alive.$PROFILE hints.activeAhead, activeNow, and queueBehind metrics to better identify active-run blockers.Users will experience fewer "stuck" sessions and more reliable subagent completions. The hardening of the Codex runtime and the fix for Telegram's ingress worker ensure that the system remains responsive even during complex task execution or configuration changes.
Android users gain a near-instantaneous voice interaction experience. CLI users with large plugin sets will see a dramatic speedup in model discovery and status checks. Telegram users will see improved reliability in media group handling and topic-based completions.
Security is tightened through the redaction of private chat payloads in verbose Telegram raw-update logs and the implementation of a stricter trusted-proxy password fallback policy that only allows same-host direct requests.
While this release is largely backward compatible, operators should note the following:
gateway.auth.password for trusted-proxy deployments.oauthRef sidecars remain usable, but they will be migrated to inline credentials upon the next successful refresh or via openclaw doctor --fix.