OpenClaw dropped v2026.5.16-beta.6 in the early hours of May 18th, and the headline feature is one developers have been asking for: a proper plugin authoring SDK. This release also ships browser modal surfacing, HTTPS proxy support, and a batch of meaningful fixes across Feishu, Telegram, memory, and the Gateway restart path.
defineToolPlugin: Typed Simple Tool Plugins Are Now First-Class
The biggest addition in beta.6 is defineToolPlugin, a new function that gives plugin authors a typed, structured way to declare simple tool plugins — complete with generated manifest metadata, optional tool declarations, and context factories.
Alongside defineToolPlugin, three new CLI subcommands land:
openclaw plugins build— compiles a plugin and produces a distributable bundleopenclaw plugins validate— lints a plugin against the manifest contract before you publishopenclaw plugins init— scaffolds a new plugin project with the right structure out of the box
Prior to this release, building a plugin required piecing together conventions from the existing plugin interface, which was powerful but underdocumented for simple tool use cases. defineToolPlugin creates an opinionated, well-typed entry point for the most common pattern: plugins that expose tools. The generated manifest metadata means ClawHub can inspect a plugin's capabilities accurately without executing it.
This lands alongside the note that legacy interactive/Slack directive producer APIs are now deprecated via the new plugins/messages presentation capability limits. If you're maintaining an older plugin that produces rich Slack-style directives, this release is a good time to check the migration path.
Browser: Modal Dialogs Surface in Snapshots
The browser plugin gets a quality-of-life fix that matters for agentic flows: pending and recently handled modal dialogs now appear in browser snapshots. When an action opens a modal, the system returns a blockedByDialog signal, and the browser dialog --dialog-id command can answer pending dialogs directly.
This closes a category of stalls where agents would attempt a click or fill, trigger an unexpected dialog, and then have no visibility into why subsequent actions failed. Now the dialog is surfaced, and the agent can handle it explicitly.
HTTPS Proxy Support (PR #79171)
PR #79171 (thanks to @jesse-merhi) adds managed HTTPS forward-proxy endpoints and scoped proxy.tls.caFile CA trust for proxy endpoint TLS.
Combined with Proxyline — OpenClaw's process-global egress routing layer — this gives operators a complete path for routing OpenClaw traffic through a corporate or managed proxy that terminates its own TLS. Custom CA bundles can now be scoped to the proxy endpoint, which is a prerequisite for many enterprise network environments.
GPT-5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 Model Refs Fixed
A fix that'll unblock anyone testing newer OpenAI models: beta.6 stops rejecting available openai-codex GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2, and GPT-5.3 model refs during config validation. These were being refused by the validator while still being available from the provider. The removed Spark aliases remain correctly suppressed.
Notable Fixes
Several fixes address reliability issues that surface in long-running deployments:
- Subagent registry writes are now required before reporting spawn accepted — previously, if the registry write failed, an untracked subagent run could be lost silently (#83146)
- Kept subagent runs survive past the session sweep TTL — run-mode
keepentries no longer disappear after cleanup (#83168) - Feishu subagent completions route back to the correct DM or topic (#83190)
- Telegram isolated long polling fixed to avoid false disconnects and restart loops on idle bots with high
timeoutSeconds— a subtle bug that caused unnecessary reconnect churn (#83264) - Gateway hot-reload continues restarting remaining channels when one channel restart fails, instead of stopping the full reload (#83054)
- Memory QMD now handles hyphenated queries without falling back to the builtin index for dashed identifiers and dates
Mac App Settings Redesign
The macOS app gets a visual refresh to its Settings pages: consistent card layouts, cached navigation, and cleaner panes for permissions, voice, skills, cron, exec, and debug. The Cron Jobs pane also fixes a SwiftUI metadata crash that affected some users.
Updating
npm install -g openclaw@latest
The full changelog is on the GitHub releases page.