OpenClaw

Use Oxen.ai models from OpenClaw, a local personal AI assistant.

OpenClaw is a personal AI assistant you run on your own machine. It connects to chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and Slack, and supports custom OpenAI-compatible model providers. This guide points OpenClaw at Oxen.ai so every agent turn runs through the Oxen chat completions API.

Prerequisites

• Node 24 (recommended) or Node 22.19+
• An Oxen.ai API key, exported as OXEN_API_KEY

Install OpenClaw

npm install -g openclaw@latest

Add Oxen as a model provider

Run openclaw onboard with the custom-api-key flow:

openclaw onboard \
  --non-interactive \
  --accept-risk \
  --auth-choice custom-api-key \
  --custom-provider-id oxen \
  --custom-base-url https://hub.oxen.ai/api/ai \
  --custom-api-key "$OXEN_API_KEY" \
  --custom-model-id claude-sonnet-4-6 \
  --custom-compatibility openai \
  --custom-text-input \
  --install-daemon

Output:

Updated config: ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json
Workspace OK: ~/.openclaw/workspace
Sessions OK: ~/.openclaw/agents/main/sessions

--custom-model-id sets the default model. Pick any text model from the Oxen catalog; a capable general-purpose model like claude-sonnet-4-6 is a good starting choice. --install-daemon installs the gateway as a background service so it stays running.

This writes a models.providers.oxen block to ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json with baseUrl, apiKey, api: "openai-completions", and a one-entry models list.

Run an agent turn

openclaw agent --agent main --message "What is a great name for an ox? Reply in 5 words or less."

Output:

**Bruno** works perfectly for an ox.

The agent calls https://hub.oxen.ai/api/ai/chat/completions under the hood, billed to your Oxen account.

Add more models

To expose a second Oxen model, edit models.providers.oxen.models in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json and append an entry with the same shape:

{
  "id": "gpt-5-mini",
  "name": "GPT-5 Mini",
  "input": ["text"],
  "cost": { "input": 0, "output": 0, "cacheRead": 0, "cacheWrite": 0 },
  "contextWindow": 200000,
  "maxTokens": 4096,
  "reasoning": false
}

Then switch the default:

openclaw models set oxen/gpt-5-mini

Next steps

• Connect OpenClaw to WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or any other supported channel so you can chat with your Oxen-backed assistant from anywhere.
• Browse the full Oxen model catalog. Vision models work through the same provider; see Vision Language Models for the message shape.