OpenClaw v2026.5.22: Performance Gains, Meeting Notes, and 100+ Fixes

OpenClaw shipped v2026.5.22 on May 22, 2026. This release is a performance and reliability focused update that touches nearly every surface of the agent runtime — from gateway startup times to channel-specific bug fixes.

What changed

Gateway performance

The headline improvement is startup speed. OpenClaw now reuses immutable plugin metadata snapshots across startup, config, model, channel, setup, and secret metadata readers. Hot paths no longer repeat plugin file stats or reload manifest registries. Plugin SDK alias maps are cached, and irrelevant macOS Linuxbrew PATH probes are skipped. Idle plugin work, core gateway handlers, and the embedded ACPX runtime are lazy-loaded so health and ready signals return faster.

A specific benchmark from the release notes: the /models listing call dropped from roughly 20 seconds to 5 milliseconds per request after pre-warming provider auth-state maps at gateway startup. That is a 4,100× improvement for a common operation.

Meeting Notes plugin

A new source-only external meeting-notes plugin ships outside the core npm package. It includes auto-start capture config, manual transcript imports, read-only openclaw meeting-notes CLI access, and Discord voice as the first live source. This is positioned as a capture-and-reference tool rather than a real-time assistant.

Platform and provider expansion

New provider support includes Anthropic Vertex (Claude via Google Vertex AI), Chutes with OAuth and API-key auth, MiniMax M2.7, xAI Grok with model aliases, Z.AI GLM 4.5/4.6, and Xiaomi via an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The web-search plugin set adds Exa, Tavily, and Firecrawl as bundled options.

Documentation improvements

The release includes extensive documentation updates: Signal configPath, Telegram wildcard topic defaults, local-time backup archive names, Termux home fallback, Gemini CLI and Antigravity media guidance, macOS VM auto-login, and clarifications around model-usage portability, Codex migration prerequisites, context-pruning ratio bounds, and browser CDP diagnostics. Over 30 community contributors are credited across the documentation changes.

Windows installer overhaul

The Windows installation path was rebuilt. The installer now bootstraps a user-local portable Node.js when no Node is present, extracts with native tar before falling back to .NET zip extraction, persists portable Git on PATH, activates repo-pinned pnpm, and rolls back git-backed updates when any step fails. This addresses a long-standing gap where Windows installs were more fragile than macOS or Linux.

Agent and channel fixes

Notable fixes include:

• Sub-agent bootstrap context is now limited to AGENTS.md and TOOLS.md by default, keeping persona and identity files out of delegated workers
• Telegram now passes local path and structured attachment media from sendMessage actions instead of dropping them
• Discord component registry lifetime is configurable with a 24-hour cap for long-running workflows
• WhatsApp cold starts dropped from tens of seconds to seconds via model pre-warming
• The default agent timeout was raised from 600 seconds to 48 hours
• Codex app-server now retries when server-side compaction times out
• OpenAI video edit requests now route to the correct /videos/edits endpoint
• PDF tool times out idle remote reads after 120 seconds
• Memory search stops writing dreaming side-effects when dreaming is disabled

Security and packaging

The npm package now ships with generated shrinkwrap and supports bundled plugin runtime dependencies. Lockfile and shrinkwrap changes require review. Documentation images and assets are excluded from the npm tarball, reducing published package size.

What to do now

If you run OpenClaw in production, this is a low-risk upgrade. There are no breaking changes listed in the release notes. The performance improvements are automatic — no configuration changes required. If you use Windows, the new installer path is worth testing on a fresh machine.

If you manage plugins, the lazy-loading and metadata caching changes should reduce gateway restart time noticeably. The Meeting Notes plugin is opt-in and requires explicit configuration.

What to watch next

The ClawHub marketplace is still young. With bundled plugin dependencies now supported, watch for plugin authors shipping self-contained tarballs. The Windows installer improvements may shift the user distribution — if you maintain channel plugins or documentation, expect more Windows-specific bug reports in the near term.