OpenClaw v2026.5.26 Stable: Transcripts, Faster Gateway, and Six Security Fixes

After a two-beta stabilization cycle, OpenClaw v2026.5.26 graduated to stable today at 11:27 UTC — bringing one of the project's larger shipping weeks to a close. The release spans eight headline areas: transcripts, performance, voice/Talk, channel reliability, mobile, security, observability, and install hardening.

Transcripts Are Now a First-Class Feature

The biggest new capability in this release is transcript capture. OpenClaw can now record session transcripts with source-provider chunks, cleaned user turns, and media provenance — enabling transcript-backed meeting summaries via a new Transcripts CLI surface. WebChat replies, Codex mirrors, and CLI/TUI replay all route through a single, more reliable transcript path. If you run OpenClaw in team or meeting contexts, this is the feature to check out first.

Gateway Startup and Reply Speed

Performance improvements touch several hot paths:

• Metadata caching: plugin snapshots, package realpaths, model cost indexes, channel resolution, and auth facts are now cached so common Gateway and reply paths skip expensive rediscovery on each turn.
• Lazy loading: slash-command startup metadata, context compaction, and warning imports are deferred so the Gateway boot path avoids work it doesn't immediately need.
• Visible reply separation: user-facing sends are now decoupled from slower follow-up work, reducing perceived reply latency. One contributor (@keshavbotagent) landed six targeted fixes for this in PRs #86989–#86994.

Channel Reliability

Every major channel got fixes in this cycle:

• Telegram: text entities preserved, forum topics retained, DM overlaps fixed, typing/progress context kept alive.
• iMessage: image attachments read from ~/Library/Messages/Attachments, duplicate local sources deduplicated, slash-command acknowledgements routed back to source conversation.
• WhatsApp: group-drop warnings and ack identity restored.
• Discord: voice playback improved, large model-picker menus now use alphabetic buckets (e.g. "A–G (12) · H–N (18)") instead of paginated prev/next. Thanks @rendrag-git.
• Signal/iMessage/WhatsApp: all three now support reaction-based approval (👍 to approve, no /approve text needed). PR #85894, #85952, #85477.

Mobile: Android Pairing + iOS Realtime Talk

Two mobile improvements stand out:

• Android: A new "pair new gateway" action makes onboarding a second device much smoother. PR #86798.
• iOS: Realtime Talk mode now runs direct voice sessions with compact toolbar status and a responsive waveform visualizer. PR #86355. Thanks @ngutman.

Six Security Fixes

This release patches a notable cluster of security issues — all credited to community researchers:

1. Prompt injection in memory_store: text resembling prompts is now rejected before embedding/storage, matching the existing auto-capture filter. PR #87142.
2. Auth rate limiter: the default rate limiter now fires for remote non-browser HTTP auth failures even when gateway.auth.rateLimit is unset. PR #87148.
3. Browser SSRF: Browser snapshot tab URLs are now validated against SSRF policy before ChromeMCP or CDP reads. PR #78526. Thanks @zsxsoft.
4. System-event prompt spoofing: queued system-event text is sanitized so untrusted plugin/channel labels cannot inject nested prompt markers. PR #87094. Thanks @ttzero25.
5. File-fetch wrapping: text fetched from external files is now wrapped as external content. PR #87062. Thanks @mmaps.
6. Stale device tokens: RPCs from clients with invalidated device tokens are rejected during token rotation. PR #70707.

Other Notable Changes

• Rastermill replaces Sharp: image metadata, resizing, EXIF orientation, and PNG alpha-preserving optimization now use Rastermill, dropping the Sharp dependency entirely. PR #86437.
• Activity tab in Control UI: a new ephemeral Activity tab shows live sanitized tool activity without persisting raw telemetry. Fixes #12831. Thanks @BunsDev.
• Cron parallelism: cron.maxConcurrentRuns now defaults to 8, so scheduled automations can run in parallel without explicit config.
• Named auth profiles: Hermes, OpenCode, and Codex auth profiles now support named model login with credential migration and explicit opt-out. PR #85667. Thanks @fuller-stack-dev.
• OpenTelemetry LLM spans: new content spans for LLM calls, plus alertable telemetry for blocked tools, failover, stale sessions, and oversized payloads. PR #83019.
• Codex 0.134.0: bundled Codex CLI updated; native compaction disabled for budget-triggered app-server turns so OpenClaw owns the recovery boundary.

How to Update

openclaw update

Full release notes are on GitHub.