What is the OpenClaw thinking leak bug?

Internal chain-of-thought reasoning gets sent as visible messages on WhatsApp instead of being hidden. Users see the agent's internal thought process.

Which versions are affected by the thinking leak?

First reported after v2026.2.22-2. Previous fixes regressed in v3.7, making it a recurring issue across multiple versions.

Is the thinking leak a privacy risk?

Yes — at ~105K tokens (~52% of context limit), context overflow can send internal system commands and instructions to external contacts.

How do I prevent thinking leaks in OpenClaw?

Set thinking mode to 'off' in your channel configuration, and monitor for the regression in newer versions.

Does the thinking leak affect other channels besides WhatsApp?

Yes, Discord is also affected (issue #44905). The underlying bug is in how reasoning content is serialized to channel output.

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clawsmith.com/signal/openclaw-extended-thinking-leaks-whatsapp

⚠ IssueUnknownCore BugLive

OpenClaw extended thinking / reasoning content leaks into WhatsApp as visible messages

Internal chain-of-thought reasoning gets sent as visible WhatsApp messages instead of being hidden. Reported in 4+ issues, regressed in v3.7. At ~105K tokens, context overflow sends internal system commands to external contacts.

Product Idea from this Signal

A sandbox environment that tests OpenClaw upgrades against your agents before they break production

3.2k ▲

Every OpenClaw release breaks something. v2026.3.22 broke the Dashboard and WhatsApp. v2026.3.2 silently disabled all agent tools. v2026.3.8 killed cron jobs and compaction. v2026.3.28 permanently broke the exec tool in a way that downgrading could not fix. Users discover these regressions after upgrading their production instance. There is no pre-upgrade testing, no rollback plan, and no way to know if a new version will break your specific configuration. This tool creates a sandboxed replica of your OpenClaw setup, runs the upgrade there first, executes your critical workflows against it, and gives you a pass/fail verdict before touching production.

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