What's New in OpenClaw — The Past Half Month (3.8 to 3.13)

OpenClaw has moved very fast in the first half of March, rolling out multiple updates from 2026.3.8 all the way to 2026.3.13.

Instead of a fragmented changelog, we've pulled together the most important changes over the past two weeks that you'll actually feel in your day-to-day usage.

Using all 1M Tokens of GPT-5.4 & Perplexity Search Returns

Following the release of newer models, 2026.3.8 landed some key engine capability updates:

Full GPT-5.4 Support: Agents are no longer constrained by legacy Codex lengths. You now have full access to the massive 1,050,000-token context window, meaning giant codebases or massive documents won't get arbitrarily truncated anymore.
Perplexity is Back: Compatibility for Perplexity OpenRouter and Sonar models has been fully restored. Whether via native API keys or proxies, you can point your Agent to Perplexity for high-quality web research once again.

Smoother Chat and More Stable Mac Voice Mode

The client experience has seen several tangible improvements over the last two weeks:

The chat history no longer reloads the entire page when background tools are running.
Extremely long responses are no longer squished into a single, unreadable block of gray text.
2026.3.12 reorganized the dashboard layout — putting chat, config, and agent management into a much cleaner view.
Mac users also got a fix in 2026.3.8 that resolves crashing issues with VoiceWake and Talk overlay panels, making hands-free conversation much more reliable.

Slack Bots Send Buttons, Teams Gets Tougher

If you plug OpenClaw into your workspace, the integrations have matured:

Slack: 2026.3.12 and 3.13 added support for Slack Block Kit. Bot replies aren't just walls of text anymore—they can use buttons, cards, and dropdowns. This makes handling approvals and quick selections feel like a native Slack app.
MS Teams: 2026.3.8 patched an allowlist issue. Now, channel restrict policies strictly enforce sender limits, closing a loophole where outside senders in group channels could accidentally be authorized.

Telegram and Discord Channel Stability

The messaging pipelines have been significantly toughened up:

Telegram: Image and file download flows are more robust; plus, 3.8 fixed polling restarts so bots no longer trigger multiple overlapping long-polls (which used to cause duplicate replies when restarting).
Discord: Reply splitting, status feedback, and routing stability have been tuned.
/reset behavior improved: The original account and thread context are better preserved, so conversations are far less likely to "cross the streams" after a reset.

Scheduled Tasks Are Worth Automating Again

Lots of users rely on OpenClaw for daily digests or weekly aggregations rather than real-time chat. Starting in 3.8, the cron engine got some serious TLC:

Server restarts no longer break scheduled tasks: Overdue jobs will now intelligently catch up instead of simultaneously flooding the system or skipping silently.
2026.3.11 addressed status recording and retry boundaries.
2026.3.13 eliminated specific system deadlocks caused by nested cron overlapping.

In short: if scheduled tasks have ever disappointed you before, try them again. They are significantly more predictable now.

Mobile Experience Stepped Up

Mobile users aren't left behind with these patches:

iOS gained a proper welcome screen, onboarding flow, and a home layout optimized for smaller screens.
Android received a rebuilt chat settings page, making connection, voice, and media preferences much clearer.
The initial QR-code pairing and onboarding process is noticeably smoother.

A Treat for Self-Hosted Users

If you run your own instance, Docker now supports the OPENCLAW_TZ timezone setting. In addition, 3.8 added auto-detection for SELinux modes, automatically applying the proper volume labels in Podman. That fixes pesky Permission denied errors on RHEL/Fedora hosts without manual hacking.

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