OpenClaw April 2026 release notes: every release through April 21

By Linas Valiukas · April 21, 2026

April 2026 was defined by one event: Anthropic cutting off Claude subscriptions from OpenClaw on April 4. Half the month's releases were scrambles to make OpenClaw work without the old adapter. The other half were the features that were already in the pipeline. Seven releases in the first three weeks. One major version. Three CVE patches. Here's everything that shipped through April 21.

v2026.4.1 - /tasks (April 1)

The first April release was a quiet one and also one of the more useful changes in months. A chat-native task board you can pull up by typing /tasks in any session. Under the hood, it's the visible end of a new SQLite-backed task ledger that replaced the old fragmented lifecycle management.

Full writeup: OpenClaw's new /tasks feature.

v2026.4.2 - Durable task flows (April 3)

Two days after /tasks landed, v2026.4.2 added durable flow orchestration. Multi-step pipelines that survive a gateway restart and pick up where they left off, instead of starting over. Only applies to flows running in managed mode - regular cron and CLI tasks are still fire-and-forget.

This was the last release before the Anthropic news hit.

April 4: the Anthropic cutoff (not a release, but it shaped the rest of the month)

Anthropic shipped a policy change: Claude subscriptions (Pro, Max, Team) no longer cover OpenClaw usage. The existing OAuth adapter stopped working overnight. If you'd wired OpenClaw to your Claude Pro seat, your agent went dark until you set up pay-as-you-go API keys. Self-hosters who'd built their whole setup around "free" subscription-backed Claude had to rethink the money.

The OpenClaw team hadn't known this was coming. Every release from v2026.4.3 through v4.3 was in some way a reaction to this.

v2026.4.3 - Emergency provider hardening (April 7)

Three days after the cutoff. Mostly a stability patch for the providers people were suddenly hammering.

• OpenRouter adapter fixes. The old adapter had three long-standing bugs nobody noticed because Claude subscription users never hit them. Retry loops, 429 mishandling, and a bad token counter that double-billed reasoning traces.
• GLM-5.1 native adapter. The open-weights frontier model a lot of people were switching to. Previously you had to go through OpenRouter; now there's a direct adapter.
• Gemini 2.5 Pro adapter. Google's API had been working via the generic OpenAI-compatible adapter, but not well. This release shipped a proper native one.
• Ollama improvements. Local model users got better context handling and a fix for the silent-truncation bug that clipped long conversations.

If you're trying to figure out which setup is actually affordable after the cutoff, see OpenClaw without Anthropic for real configs and numbers.

v2026.4.4 - April CVE round (April 11)

Three CVEs patched in one release. None hit the critical 9.9 bar that March's big one did, but two of them are remotely exploitable on instances with default configs.

• CVE-2026-28114 (CVSS 8.1) - Skill sandbox escape via symlink traversal. A malicious skill could read files outside its allowed paths by planting a symlink during install. All ClawHub-installed skills should be assumed suspect until reinstalled after the patch.
• CVE-2026-28115 (CVSS 7.2) - Prompt injection via clipboard-sourced context. Agents that auto-pulled clipboard contents into system prompts could be steered by whatever was copied last. Affected the iMessage and macOS web UI integrations most.
• CVE-2026-28116 (CVSS 6.4) - ACP token leakage in debug logs. Not remote, but embarrassing if you'd pasted logs into a GitHub issue. Rotate your ACP tokens if you ever did.

Pattern-wise, this is the third month in a row with at least three CVEs. See the March breakdown for the pattern.

v4.3 "Multi-Provider Engine" (April 14)

The month's only major release. A rewrite of how OpenClaw talks to model providers, driven directly by the post-cutoff mess. You can think of it as the plumbing layer that should have existed before April 4 but didn't.

• Unified provider routing. One config file (providers.toml) defines every model endpoint your agent can use. Anthropic, OpenRouter, GLM-5.1, Gemini, Ollama, vLLM, anything OpenAI-compatible.
• Fallback chains. Set a primary and two fallbacks per agent. If the primary is rate-limited or down, requests flow to the next one without dropping the session.
• Per-provider budget caps. A hard ceiling in dollars or tokens per day/week/month. When you hit it, the agent switches to the next provider in the chain instead of burning through your card. This is the one thing that might actually stop phantom token burn from producing shock bills.
• /provider slash command. Check which provider is currently active, what's been spent this cycle, and switch on the fly.
• Reasoning-trace billing fixes. Thinking tokens are now accounted separately from response tokens, matching how Anthropic and Google actually bill.

Breaking changes: The old llm config block is gone. Setups that relied on the Claude subscription adapter won't auto-migrate - you have to write a new providers.toml by hand and reboot. Most third-party LLM plugins needed rewrites again.

v2026.4.5 - Opus 4.7 + heartbeat controls (April 16)

Two Reddit-driven changes in one release.

• Claude Opus 4.7 support. Anthropic's latest. Faster than 4.6 at similar quality, with the 1M context variant available via a separate flag. The provider adapter handles the new pricing tier without you having to hand-edit rates.
• Heartbeat cycle controls. The invisible loop that keeps your agent alive was burning tokens even when nothing was happening. r/openclaw has been complaining about this for months. v2026.4.5 added three new config values: heartbeat.interval_sec, heartbeat.idle_threshold, and heartbeat.sleep_on_idle. Set them, and idle agents stop pinging the model provider during quiet hours. Multiple users have reported 40-70% cost reductions after tuning this.
• REM reflector stability. The memory reflection subsystem (OpenClaw's background "dreaming" loop) was getting stuck on stale corpus files. Now it advances to the next batch instead of looping forever on the same one.

The heartbeat change alone is worth the upgrade for anyone running on pay-as-you-go.

v2026.4.6 - Config self-destruct guard (April 18)

A weirder one. Several users reported that sub-agents with filesystem access had written broken JSON into their own openclaw.json, leaving their instance unable to boot. One Italian user on r/openclaw posted "OpenClaw si è suicidato" after the agent edited the config root and killed itself. It turns out to be a real foot-gun: if you give an agent generic filesystem tools and let it operate in its own working directory, there's nothing stopping it from "fixing" its own config.

v2026.4.6 shipped a schema guard. Writes to openclaw.json, providers.toml, and the ACP key files get rejected from within agent execution contexts unless --allow-root-config-writes is explicitly set. Also: any change to a guarded file is snapshotted, so you can roll back. This should have been there from day one.

v2026.4.7 - Stability patch (April 20)

The most recent release. Mostly cleanup of things that broke in v4.3.

• Fallback chain now respects the timeout_sec setting instead of hanging indefinitely when a provider goes silent.
• Budget cap counters reset correctly across daylight-saving boundaries.
• GLM-5.1 adapter handles the "faster" variant endpoint the provider added on April 18.
• /tasks board now shows provider costs per task when the Multi-Provider Engine is enabled.
• Fix for ACP sessions going zombie when the heartbeat interval is set too low.

The upgrade math, again

If you're on v4.2 (end of March) and looking at v2026.4.7 (April 20), here's what you're signing up for:

• Read seven changelogs
• Rewrite your LLM config into providers.toml
• Set up API keys for whatever post-Anthropic providers you're using
• Decide on budget caps and fallback chains
• Reinstall any ClawHub skills to clear the CVE-2026-28114 symlink risk
• Rotate ACP tokens if you ever pasted logs publicly
• Retune the heartbeat config so your agent stops burning money idle
• Verify your sub-agents don't rely on editing openclaw.json (unlikely, but worth checking)
• Test every messaging integration after the provider migration

Call it a weekend of work if everything goes smoothly. People on r/openclaw are reporting 6-12 hours depending on how many customizations they'd built.

Or skip the treadmill

Every one of these releases landed on TryOpenClaw.ai automatically. The Anthropic cutoff, the CVE patches, the v4.3 provider rewrite, the config-self-edit guard, the heartbeat controls. You didn't need to read a changelog, rewrite a config file, or rotate a token. Our infrastructure was already on multiple providers before the Multi-Provider Engine existed, which meant the April 4 cutoff was a one-line config change on our side and zero downtime on yours.

That's the deal. You use the agent. We keep up with the release pace. $39/month, flat, no API bill surprises.