OpenClaw 2.23 Update: 1 Million Token Context, Model Freedom, and More

OpenClaw just dropped version 2.23, and honestly, this one’s packed. We’re getting updates almost daily at this point, but I know you’re busy — so let me break down the features that actually matter and what they mean for your AI agent setup.

The Big One: 1 Million Token Context Window

Let’s start with the headline feature — a 1 million token context window, now available in beta for Claude Opus and Sonnet. This is massive. To put it in perspective, that’s roughly five times larger than previous context limits, and you could fit about a quarter of the entire Harry Potter series in a single conversation.

Why does this matter? One of the biggest reasons your AI agent sometimes feels “dumb” is context overflow. Every conversation you have with your agent sends the entire chat history along with it. When that history exceeds the context window, the agent starts forgetting things — earlier instructions, preferences, important details. It’s not that the AI got stupider; it literally ran out of memory.

With 1 million tokens, your agent can hold an entire day’s worth of back-and-forth without needing to restart or losing track of what you discussed that morning. If you’re using your agent daily for scheduling, research, or project management, this is a game-changer. The catch? It’s expensive. Running Opus with a full 1 million context window will cost significantly more than shorter conversations.

Model Freedom: Save Money Without Sacrificing Quality

This is where things get practical. OpenClaw 2.23 makes it easier than ever to switch between AI models on the fly. The idea is simple: not every task needs the most powerful (and expensive) model.

Need to build a quick dashboard or generate a simple script? Send it to MiniMax or Kimi — they’re fast and cheap. Need deep reasoning, complex scheduling, or life-planning tasks like booking restaurant reservations? Keep that on Opus, where the extra intelligence actually matters.

Speaking of which, Anthropic just released Claude Sonnet 4.6, which approaches Opus-level intelligence at roughly half the cost and twice the speed. It’s already available on Amazon Bedrock and GitHub Copilot. For most everyday agent tasks, Sonnet 4.6 is probably the sweet spot between performance and cost.

Sub-Agent Orchestration: Let Your Agent Be the Boss

Sub-agent orchestration isn’t technically new in OpenClaw, but 2.23 refines it further. The concept is straightforward: instead of you managing multiple AI agents individually, you designate one agent as the coordinator. That coordinator spins up sub-agents for parallel tasks, collects the results, and reports back to you.

Here’s a tip that came up in our discussion: be explicit with your agent. Tell it “you are the orchestrator, you command the sub-agents, I don’t want to interact with them directly.” Early on, one of our partners was manually talking to eight different agents individually — that’s doing it the hard way. Let the coordinator handle delegation. You just talk to one agent.

This pattern is especially powerful for research workflows. Your main agent can spin up multiple research bots simultaneously, each investigating a different angle, then synthesize everything into a single report.

Video Understanding: Cool But Expensive

OpenClaw now supports video understanding through Moonshot integration. Your agent can literally watch videos and process visual content. Before you get too excited though — this is still in the “cool but impractical for daily use” category.

The computational cost of processing video is significant. We’re not at the point where your agent can binge-watch Netflix and write you a sequel. It’s more suited for specific use cases where you need an AI to analyze video content for work purposes. We’ll be doing a deeper dive on Kimi Vision in an upcoming video.

Security Hardening and Cron Job Fixes

On the security front, the advice remains the same: use a VPS. The way we’ve always recommended installing OpenClaw — on a separate virtual private server rather than your main machine — is still the safest approach. Don’t let your agent access every aspect of your life just yet.

Cron jobs got some attention too. These are your scheduled tasks — daily news briefings, morning presentations, automated reports. They’ve been a bit unreliable for some users, particularly when old cron jobs pile up and try to execute simultaneously. The fix? Clean up your old cron jobs first, and consider having your agent build a dashboard to track all scheduled tasks. That way you can verify everything is running on schedule. Don’t trust, verify.

OpenClaw’s Future: Foundation Model

One important piece of context: OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger announced on February 14 that he’s joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw itself is transitioning to an independent open-source foundation, with OpenAI’s continued support. So despite the leadership change, the project remains open-source and actively developed — as evidenced by the rapid pace of updates we’re seeing.

How to Update

Updating is dead simple. Just tell your agent: “Hey, update yourself to the latest OpenClaw.” That’s it. Works about 95% of the time. The other 5%? Well, as we like to say — when you’re using AI, you’re playing casino. But we have tutorials for when things go sideways, so don’t worry.

The Bottom Line

OpenClaw 2.23 is a solid update. The 1 million token context window is the standout feature for power users, while model freedom is the real money-saver for everyone else. Sub-agent orchestration continues to mature, and the security and cron improvements address real pain points.

If you’re running OpenClaw, update now. If you’re not, check out our setup guide to get started. And if you want to see more content like this, join our community over at BoxminingAI and drop a comment — our bot actually reads all of them now.