OpenClaw 3.1 Update: You Won't Believe What Can Do Now (Must-Know Features)

OpenClaw 3.1 ships adaptive Claude thinking that auto-scales between Opus and Haiku to cut daily spend.

What actually changed

This is a "behind the scenes" release, not a flashy feature drop. The headline item is Claude 4.6 adaptive thinking built directly into OpenClaw. Until now, scaling down to Sonnet or Haiku was something you had to handle manually — sometimes Claude did it in the background, sometimes it didn't. With 3.1 you enable adaptive thinking and the model picks the tier per task.

The cost angle

The creator's daily bill using Opus on his own OpenClaw runs "upwards of $30 US per day." He's running a heavy plan this month and is hoping adaptive thinking delivers "a 20 or 30% reduction." The use case is clear: high intelligence is reserved for architecture work, while "groceries" and maintenance cron jobs no longer need a PhD-level model. A follow-up video will publish the actual savings once the Profico bill arrives.

Cron job fixes

Three pain points got addressed. Cron delivery is now fully disabled when delivery mode is set to none — no more silent output leaking into channels, which the creator partly blames on "context bleeding from one channel to another." Failed cron jobs now also surface a failure message (in English or Simplified Chinese) instead of dying silently. Full i18n landed, so non-English users get semantic search that previously only worked in English.

Docker and sub-agents

Docker support is expanded, specifically for running multiple sub-agents in containers. The creator is explicitly pushing a "sub-aentic future" — sub-agents outperform main agents because "their context is not overloaded." Dockerizing them is the next setup they're testing.

How to update

Run openclaw update directly on your VPS terminal. The creator warns that asking your agent to self-update can throw it into an "update loop" — he watched it happen live over 100 seconds on screen. Skip OpenAI testing for now; the channel only validates Opus and MiniMax setups.