They Wanted to Connect Live Lobsters to OpenClaw. Common Sense Died Before the Crustaceans

At the Biopunk House, one of the hacker houses in the Bay Area affiliated with the The Residency network (of which Sam Altman is an adviser), two residents attempted to merge biology and artificial intelligence in a questionable home experiment.

Elliot Roth, 32, and William Joy, 19, aimed to implant a commercial kit designed to remotely control cockroaches into live lobsters, in order to control their claws and connect the modified crustaceans to the open-source AI agent OpenClaw.

A reporter from The Atlantic, working on a report about the hacker houses in the Bay Area, recounted Joy's statement: "I'm pretty sure this will be the first real case of a complex AI agent interacting with a biological organism."

The two also considered animal welfare, stating their intention to administer an anesthetic to the lobsters before the surgery; Joy added that the animals were already "scheduled for dinner" and would be eaten after the experiment concluded.

OpenClaw is an autonomous open-source AI agent licensed under the MIT license, developed by the Austrian Peter Steinberger and released in November 2025 under the name Warelay before being renamed several times; its logo, not coincidentally, features a lobster. The project leverages language models such as Claude, DeepSeek, or GPT via messaging interfaces like Signal, Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp, and by March 2026 had already garnered 247,000 stars on GitHub.

Steinberger announced his entry into OpenAI in February 2026 after which the project was managed by the OpenClaw Foundation.

The Experiment Ended Before It Even Started

When the Atlantic reporter returned to check weeks later, he found a requiem: the lobsters had died before the surgery could take place. Joy performed a "preliminary" autopsy on the specimens, navigating what is described as a genuine ethical crisis regarding whether and how to proceed, and admitted that the issue might have been a mistake in the salinity of the water. It should be noted that the lobsters were not eaten as initially promised.

One might wonder how it was possible that two "biohackers" could have been convinced to operate on a lobster when they couldn't even determine the correct concentration of salt in the tank. But this episode is somewhat a reflection of the ethical superficiality that pervades the entire AI sector, manifesting in various forms: harmful chatbots, non-consensual deepfakes, and the environmental impact of the energy demand generated by data centers.

The character Ian Malcolm in Crichton's Jurassic Park critiques the idea behind cloning dinosaurs: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could do it, that they didn’t stop to think if they should," condemning the arrogance that bypasses the question of duty. At the Biopunk House the reversal occurred on both fronts: if they truly asked themselves whether they should, given that the autopsy initiated a small ethical crisis, but in response to the question of whether they could, the tank answered with incorrect salinity that killed the lobsters before the scalpel. The two deserve credit for their ambition, not for aquaculture: before piloting a crustacean with an AI agent, it would be wise to know how to keep it alive.