OpenClaw shipped its v2026.5.20 stable release today, rounding out a beta cycle that ran through two pre-release builds and landing a slate of Discord, policy, and provider improvements that most self-hosters have been waiting on.
Discord Voice Sessions Now Follow You
The headline feature for Discord users is voice-follow: OpenClaw can now track a configured Discord user as they move between voice channels, handling multi-user handoff, bounded reconciliation, and DAVE recovery preservation automatically (#84264, thanks @fuller-stack-dev).
Paired with that, voice realtime sessions now inject bounded profile context — IDENTITY.md, USER.md, and SOUL.md — into session instructions by default, so your agent's personality carries into voice without extra configuration. You can opt out by setting voice.realtime.bootstrapContextFiles: [] (#84499).
Bundled Policy Plugin
A new first-party Policy plugin ships in this release, providing policy-backed channel conformance checks, doctor lint findings, and opt-in workspace repair (#80407). This is the cleanest answer yet to "how do I enforce guardrails across all my channels without wiring custom logic." It shows up in openclaw doctor output immediately after upgrading.
xAI Device-Code OAuth for Headless Setups
Users running OpenClaw on headless servers or remote VMs can now authorize xAI/Grok without needing a localhost browser callback. The new device-code OAuth flow (#84005) generates a short code you confirm in your browser elsewhere — the same pattern used by tools like GitHub CLI.
OpenRouter Routing Policy
OpenRouter users gain provider-level routing policy support: you can now specify params.provider routing constraints on the provider config, with per-model and per-agent overrides taking precedence (thanks @amknight).
Notable Fixes
- Doctor warns on sandbox tool policy hiding MCP tools before provider requests hit (#84699) — a fix that will save a lot of head-scratching for MCP users
- Cron jobs no longer block main-session chat — scheduled work now runs on a cron-owned wake lane (#82767)
- Symlinked credential files now fail closed for Telegram, LINE, Zalo, IRC, and Nextcloud Talk tokens — a quiet but important security fix
- Doctor warns when
openclaw.jsoncontains plaintext API keys (#84718) - Codex bundled harness bumped to @openai/codex 0.132.0 with refreshed model catalog docs
- WhatsApp: Baileys updated to 7.0.0-rc12
How to Upgrade
openclaw update
Full changelog is on GitHub.