openclaw v2026.6.5-beta.1 release notes: what's new & changelog

openclaw v2026.6.5-beta.1 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 Parallel Web-Search Provider

Parallel is now a bundled web_search provider designed for agentic search, returning LLM-optimized dense excerpts. It is configurable via the PARALLEL_API_KEY environment variable or plugins.entries.parallel.config.webSearch.apiKey config. The provider includes support for custom base URL overrides (e.g., for Cloudflare AI Gateway proxying) and integrates directly into the pnpm openclaw onboard search-provider picker.

Channel Enhancements

• Matrix: Now supports inbound audio preflight, allowing voice notes to be transcribed before the mention gate. Threading has been improved so that room reads exclude thread traffic and outbound thread replies preserve Matrix fallback metadata.
• QQBot: Implements a sanitizeText hook to strip model reasoning and thinking scaffolding (e.g., <thinking> tags) before delivery, preventing internal model narration from leaking into channel replies.
• WhatsApp: Now restarts the channel on hot config reload when per-account config fields change, ensuring disabled accounts are properly torn down. Background startup waits are now bounded by the configured socket timeout to prevent infinite hangs.
• Feishu: Streaming-card updates now preserve cumulative visible markdown instead of sending only the suffix content, ensuring the full reply text is maintained in CardKit.

Agent and Session Stability

• 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: Non-text/image MCP tool-result blocks (such as resource_link, resource, and audio) are now coerced to text at the materialize boundary. This prevents Anthropic 400 errors and poisoned session history caused by malformed image blocks.
• Session Compaction: Stale thinking signatures are now stripped from assistant messages before Anthropic replay following session compaction, preventing permanent session stalls due to invalid signatures.
• Stall Detection: The embedded agent runner now detects unsigned thinking-only stalls when a reasoning payload inflates the payload count but no visible text is generated, triggering a retry or an incomplete-turn error.

Platform and Infrastructure

• Auth Storage: Auth profiles and runtime state have been migrated from JSON files to SQLite (openclaw-agent.sqlite) for improved durability.
• Config Security: The gateway mutation allowlist now protects global agent prompt overlays and global default model selection from being rewritten by agent-facing gateway tools.
• Podman Support: Dockerfile base image references are now fully qualified (e.g., docker.io/oven/bun) to prevent hangs on Podman hosts with short-name-mode = "enforcing".
• Google Vertex AI: Fixed a regression where ADC-backed static catalog providers were dropped, ensuring google-vertex/* models are correctly resolved at runtime for ADC users.

Impact

This release significantly reduces session fragility for users of Anthropic's extended thinking and MCP tools. The addition of Parallel provides a high-accuracy, agent-optimized search alternative. For channel users, the updates to Matrix and QQBot provide a more polished and native experience, while the infrastructure changes to SQLite auth storage and gateway guards harden the system against state loss and unauthorized config mutations.

FAQ

What's new in v2026.6.5-beta.1?

This release introduces the Parallel web-search provider, adds Matrix voice preflight and thread support, migrates auth profiles to SQLite, and fixes critical session stalls for Anthropic extended-thinking and MCP tool results.

Are there any breaking changes?

No breaking changes are listed in the release notes, although 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 guidance is not explicitly provided in the source, but the release includes a non-interactive cron migration path that runs during doctor config preflight to migrate legacy JSON stores into SQLite.