AI coding assistant Cline compromised, installs OpenClaw

AI coding assistant Cline compromised, installs OpenClaw

: 4K unintended installs in very odd supply chain attack

Compromised npm package silently installs OpenClaw on developer machines

A new security bypass has users installing AI agent OpenClaw — whether they intended to or not. Researchers have discovered that a compromised npm publish token pushed an update for the widely-used Cline command line interface (CLI) containing a malicious postinstall script. That script installs the wildly popular, but increasingly condemned, agentic application OpenClaw on the unsuspecting user’s machine. This can be extremely dangerous, as Ope…

Cline CLI 2.3.0 Supply Chain Attack Installed OpenClaw on Developer Systems

In yet another software supply chain attack, the open-source, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cline CLI was updated to stealthily install OpenClaw, a self-hosted autonomous AI agent that has become exceedingly popular in the past few months. "On February 17, 2026, at 3:26 AM PT, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm publish token to publish an update to Cline CLI