Descriptions:
Developer “bri” walks through a security-conscious, step-by-step installation of OpenClaw — an open-source personal AI assistant built on Anthropic’s Claude — using a Google Cloud Platform virtual machine as an isolated sandbox. The central concern driving the entire setup: OpenClaw has full system access by design (file read/write, shell command execution, web browsing), and installing it directly on a personal computer gives an AI agent access to everything stored there, including passwords, private files, and browsing history.
The tutorial covers the complete GCP setup from scratch: creating a project, enabling the Compute Engine API, provisioning a VM instance, and accessing it via both the browser-based SSH button in the GCP console and a local terminal using the gcloud CLI. Once inside the VM, OpenClaw is installed via a single curl command from the official documentation, then connected to Anthropic’s API with a walkthrough of creating a new account, purchasing credits, and generating an API key. The final step pairs the agent with Telegram so it can be controlled from a phone like a normal messaging conversation.
This video is the first in a multi-part series — the same GCP environment is reused in subsequent tutorials to build a Solana trading bot and a GitHub automation agent with the same OpenClaw instance. For anyone exploring persistent, always-on Claude deployments that take real-world actions across files, APIs, and messaging apps, this guide provides a practical and privacy-preserving starting point.
📺 Source: bri · Published February 05, 2026
🏷️ Format: Tutorial Demo
