OpenClaw 2026.4.14: GPT-5.4 Pro, ReDoS Fix, and Security Hardening

OpenClaw 2026.4.14 dropped this afternoon — the team describes it as a "broad quality release focused on model provider improvements for the GPT-5 family and channel provider issues," with an emphasis on overall performance through core codebase refactors. There is a lot to unpack.

GPT-5.4 Pro Is Now First-Class

The headline new feature is forward-compatibility support for gpt-5.4-pro across the OpenAI Codex provider, including correct pricing and limits visibility before the upstream catalog catches up (#66453). The release also maps OpenClaw's minimal thinking mode to OpenAI's supported low reasoning effort for GPT-5.4 requests, and canonicalizes the legacy openai-codex/gpt-5.4-codex runtime alias to openai-codex/gpt-5.4 while still honoring per-model overrides.

If you have been using Codex models, there is also a fix that ensures the apiKey is included in the Codex provider catalog output, preventing the Pi ModelRegistry from rejecting the entry and silently dropping all custom models from every provider in models.json (#66180).

Control UI ReDoS Fix

A notable security fix in this release replaces marked.js with markdown-it in the Control UI (#46707). The old parser was vulnerable to ReDoS — a regex denial-of-service attack where maliciously crafted markdown could freeze the UI indefinitely. If you run the web interface and interact with untrusted content, upgrade as soon as possible.

Security Hardening Across the Stack

This release includes several important security fixes merged from the recent AI-assisted security audit:

• Slack/interactions: The configured allowFrom owner allowlist now correctly applies to channel block-action and modal interactive events, closing a bypass where interactive triggers could skip the allowlist in channels without a users list (#66028).
• Media/attachments: OpenClaw now fails closed when a local attachment path cannot be canonically resolved via realpath, preventing a path-traversal downgrade attack (#66022).
• Gateway tool: The model-facing gateway tool now rejects config.patch and config.apply calls that would enable dangerous flags enumerated by the OpenClaw security audit — for example dangerouslyDisableDeviceAuth or allowInsecureAuth — while still allowing non-dangerous edits in the same patch (#62006).
• Heartbeat: Owner downgrade is now forced for untrusted hook:wake system events (#66031).
• Browser/SSRF: SSRF policy is now enforced on snapshot, screenshot, and tab routes (#66040).
• Microsoft Teams: Sender allowlist checks are now enforced on SSO signin invokes (#66033).

Ollama Gets Better Timeout and Usage Handling

Two Ollama fixes stand out. First, the configured agents.defaults.timeoutSeconds override is now properly forwarded into the global undici stream timeout, so slow local Ollama runs no longer inherit the default stream cutoff (#63175). Second, stream_options.include_usage is now sent for Ollama streaming completions, meaning local Ollama runs finally report real usage numbers instead of bogus prompt-token counts that were triggering premature context compaction (#64568).

Memory and Embedding Provider Fixes

Non-OpenAI provider prefixes are now preserved when normalizing OpenAI-compatible embedding model refs, fixing a bug where proxy-backed memory providers would fail with Unknown memory embedding provider (#66452). Google image generation also gets a fix: a trailing /openai suffix is now stripped from configured Google base URLs only when calling the native Gemini image API, so Gemini image requests stop 404-ing without breaking explicit OpenAI-compatible endpoints (#66445).

Telegram Forum Topics

Telegram operators will appreciate that human topic names are now surfaced in agent context, prompt metadata, and plugin hook metadata by learning them from forum service messages (#65973), and those learned names are now persisted to the session sidecar store so they survive restarts (#66107).

How to Update

openclaw update
openclaw gateway restart

The full changelog is on GitHub. As always, check openclaw doctor after updating if you run any custom provider or plugin configuration.