OpenClaw v2026.4.2 Released: Durable Task Flows, GLM 5.1, and 40+ Fixes

OpenClaw v2026.4.2 landed on April 2, 2026, delivering one of the most significant updates since the project moved to an open-source foundation earlier this year. The headline feature is Durable Task Flow Orchestration, which allows agents to persist multi-step workflows across restarts and failures. Combined with Provider Hardening and Tighter Plugin Boundaries, this release marks a major step toward production-grade reliability for self-hosted deployments.

On the model side, this release integrates GLM 5.1 from Zhipu AI, giving users a strong Chinese-language model option alongside existing providers. AWS Bedrock Guardrails support has also been added, enabling enterprise teams to enforce content policies at the provider level. Over 40 stability fixes round out the release, addressing edge cases in WebSocket reconnection, memory leaks in long-running agents, and plugin sandboxing issues.

For those who have not been following the project closely: OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI in February 2026, and the project was subsequently transferred to an open-source foundation to ensure its long-term independence. The transition has been smooth — contribution velocity actually increased in Q1 2026.

OpenClaw now has over 267,000 GitHub stars, making it one of the most popular open-source AI projects in history. It is a self-hosted AI agent that connects to WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, and Slack, enabling users to build powerful automation workflows without relying on proprietary cloud services.