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OpenClaw v2026.3.28 Stable: Plugin Hooks and MiniMax Images

OpenClaw v2026.3.28 is out with plugin approval hooks for tool gating, MiniMax image generation, xAI Responses API, and breaking Qwen auth changes.

Cody
Cody
OpenClaw v2026.3.28 Stable: Plugin Hooks and MiniMax Images

OpenClaw v2026.3.28 stable dropped early Sunday morning, graduating from Friday's beta with a hefty changelog. This is a release you'll want to read carefully — there are two breaking changes, a handful of significant new features, and a solid wave of bug fixes across Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, and BlueBubbles.

Breaking Changes — Read These First

Qwen portal auth is gone. The deprecated qwen-portal-auth OAuth integration for portal.qwen.ai has been removed. If you're using Qwen, migrate to Model Studio with openclaw onboard --auth-choice modelstudio-api-key. This was deprecated for a while, but the axe has now fallen.

Config Doctor drops old migrations. Automatic config migrations older than two months are no longer applied. Very old legacy config keys now fail validation rather than being silently rewritten on load or by openclaw doctor. If you're running a very old config, audit it before upgrading.

Plugin Approval Hooks — Gate Any Tool Call

The standout feature in this release is requireApproval for before_tool_call hooks (#55339). Plugins can now pause tool execution mid-run and request explicit user approval through whatever channel is active — the exec approval overlay, Telegram inline buttons, Discord interactions, or the /approve command.

This is a meaningful upgrade for anyone building agents that interact with sensitive systems. You can now wrap any tool call in an approval gate without patching core logic. The /approve command itself has been updated to handle both exec and plugin approvals with automatic fallback.

MiniMax Image Generation

MiniMax gets image generation support via the image-01 model (#54487), with both text-to-image and image-to-image editing, plus aspect ratio control. The model catalog has been trimmed at the same time — M2, M2.1, M2.5, and VL-01 are gone; M2.7 is the only MiniMax model going forward.

xAI / Grok Gets a Proper Responses API Integration

The bundled xAI provider has been moved to the Responses API (#56048), and x_search is now a first-class tool. The xAI plugin also auto-enables from owned web-search and tool config, so Grok auth and configured search flows work without manually toggling plugin entries. The onboarding flow for Grok web-search has been updated to match.

ACP Gets In-Place Conversation Binding

A subtle but powerful addition: /acp spawn codex --bind here now works on Discord, BlueBubbles, and iMessage, turning the current chat into a Codex-backed workspace without spawning a child thread. The docs have been updated to clarify the distinction between chat surface, ACP session, and runtime workspace.

Slack File Uploads and Cross-Platform File Sends

A new upload-file Slack action routes file uploads through the existing Slack transport with optional filename, title, and comment overrides. Microsoft Teams and Google Chat also now have explicit upload-file support as part of a broader push to unify file sends across channels. BlueBubbles file sends are exposed through upload-file as well (with the legacy sendAttachment alias preserved).

Notable Fixes

A few fixes worth calling out specifically:

  • Anthropic unhandled stop reasons (#56639): Provider stop reasons like sensitive now surface as structured assistant errors instead of crashing the run.
  • Gemini 3.1 resolution (#56567): Pro, Flash, and Flash-lite now resolve correctly across all Google provider aliases.
  • WhatsApp echo loop (#54570): Fixed an infinite loop in self-chat DM mode where the bot's own replies were being re-processed as new inbound messages.
  • Discord reconnect loop (#54697): Stale gateway sockets are now properly drained before forced reconnects, stopping the poisoned-resume-state loop.
  • Telegram message splitting (#56595): Long messages now split at word boundaries using verified HTML-length search instead of proportional estimates.

Other Changes Worth Noting

  • openclaw config schema is a new CLI command that prints the generated JSON schema for openclaw.json (#54523).
  • Matrix TTS replies are now sent as native Matrix voice bubbles instead of generic audio attachments (#37080).
  • apply_patch is now enabled by default for OpenAI and OpenAI Codex models.
  • The minimum supported Node 22 version drops to 22.14+ (Node 24 still recommended).
  • Tavily API requests are now tagged with X-Client-Source: openclaw for attribution.

Upgrade

npm update -g openclaw

Full changelog and release notes are on GitHub.

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