OpenClaw v2026.5.16-beta.1: Localization, Skill Caching, and 30+ Fixes

OpenClaw tagged v2026.5.16-beta.1 in the early hours of Saturday, May 16th — a substantial beta that brings internationalization to the setup wizard, a meaningful performance optimization for skill-heavy installations, and a flood of targeted fixes across nearly every channel adapter in the runtime.

CLI Localization for Chinese Speakers

The biggest headline feature this cycle is localization of the setup wizard and bundled channel setup flows. Thanks to contributor @GaosCode, OpenClaw's onboarding experience now ships in English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese out of the box (#80645).

This is more than a translation pass — the entire interactive setup flow has been wired to locale detection, meaning first-time users on Chinese-language systems will see native-language prompts without any configuration. It's a meaningful signal that OpenClaw's community has grown well beyond English-speaking markets.

Skill Cache for Warm Gateway Turns

On the performance front, @solodmd's PR #81451 introduces caching for hydrated resolvedSkills across warm gateway turns. The cache key is the redacted effective config, which means skill snapshots are reused across consecutive turns in the same session without crossing config-gated skill boundaries.

In practice, installations with many skills loaded should see measurable reductions in turn latency — the runtime no longer rebuilds the full skill snapshot from scratch on every message.

Telegram Gets Ambient Room Awareness

A new opt-in Telegram group chat mode lands via PR #81317: messages.groupChat.ambientTurns: "room_event". When enabled, always-on ambient conversation runs as quiet room context, and the agent only speaks visibly when it explicitly uses the message tool. This is a long-requested mode for users who want OpenClaw present in a group chat without it responding to every message it can see.

Crabbox AWS Config Change

Maintainers take note: Crabbox skill defaults are now routed through the repo's brokered AWS config rather than using Blacksmith Testbox as the broad-proof default. Blacksmith Testbox remains available as an explicit opt-in. No action needed for most users, but CI pipelines that relied on implicit Blacksmith routing for skill testing should be updated.

Notable Fixes

This release closes out a long list of reported issues. A few highlights:

Cron and scheduling:

• Cron now honors configured subagent model fallbacks for isolated scheduled runs, including forwarding that policy into embedded agent timeout failover. Fixes #74985.
• Failed isolated-agent runs no longer mark successful result delivery when only the failure notification was sent. Fixes #72985.

Codex and MCP:

• User MCP servers can now be scoped to specific OpenClaw agent IDs via an optional mcp.servers.<name>.codex.agents list (#82180).
• codex.defaultToolsApprovalMode (auto/prompt/approve) is now accepted for native Codex approval defaults. OpenClaw strips the codex block before passing config to Codex.

Security and input validation:

• The runtime now sniffs input file bytes before trusting declared MIME headers, rejecting spoofed image or zip payloads before they reach agent-visible text.
• Plugins: malformed package.json openclaw.extensions metadata is now rejected during install, discovery, and post-update payload smoke — no more silently dropped invalid entries.
• Config persistence now ignores malformed array/scalar auth profile, cron job state, and session store entries instead of hydrating them into bad IDs or invalid records.

Telegram:

• Drain queued outbound deliveries after polling reconnect confirms fresh getUpdates activity. Fixes the long-standing #50040.
• Mark isolated polling ingress unhealthy when a spooled inbound backlog stalls while Bot API polling still succeeds. Fixes #82175.
• The Telegram stream preview now retains longer partial content rather than replacing a complete answer with an ellipsis-truncated snapshot. Fixes #82239.

Discord:

• Message-read results are now validated before normalizing channel history, preventing map is not a function crashes. Fixes #82252.

macOS:

• Legacy ai.openclaw.update.* LaunchAgents are now disarmed when openclaw update starts from one, preventing KeepAlive relaunch loops. Fixes #82167.

Gateway/approvals:

• A long-standing APPROVALCLIENTMISMATCH bug affecting webchat and control-UI backend replays is fixed. turnSourceTo is now correctly treated as optional in canBridgeNoDeviceChatApprovalFromBackend. Fixes #82132.

LINE:

• Webhook events are now acknowledged before agent processing, so slow model replies no longer cause request_timeout failures. Fixes #65375.

Contributor Count

This release drew contributions from 46 community members — one of the larger contributor pools for a single beta tag. Notable first-time contributors include @GaosCode (localization), @obviyus (Telegram ambient turns), and @bryanbaer (gateway lifecycle hook budgets).

Updating

openclaw update

As always, run openclaw doctor after updating to catch any config migrations. The full changelog is on GitHub.