OpenClaw Ships 2026.11.1 as Latest Stable With Update Recovery and Mac Secret Safety as Tencent Hy4 Arrives on Main

2026.11.1 Is Tagged, Signed and npm's New Latest

Overnight, the stable channel moved. The OpenClaw 2026.11.1 release on GitHub is a full release, not a prerelease. Through the GitHub API, the annotated tag shows a verified signature from maintainer Dallin Romney, created at 9:29 PM Pacific on Tuesday, November 4. The npm registry metadata for the openclaw package records 2026.11.1 at 1:41 AM Pacific on Wednesday, and the GitHub release page went public at 1:48 AM. Dist-tags now read latest → 2026.11.1, beta → 2026.11.5-beta.1, and extended-stable → 2026.9.36.

This is not a cut of the Knowledge Scribes beta train we covered yesterday. The tag-pinned 2026.11.1 contribution record counts "78 unique PRs" in the audited range after 2026.10.10. A GitHub compare of v2026.10.10 through v2026.11.1 is 147 commits ahead with nothing behind. Against v2026.11.5-beta.1, the histories diverge by thousands of commits each way: two parallel lines, not a fast-forward.

Mac Secret Safety, Channel Replies and Update Recovery

The release notes lead with operator pain. Safer Mac settings: failed config saves no longer overwrite secrets with the redaction sentinel, and turning Tailscale exposure Off no longer strips Gateway authentication. Those land as pull request #187734, which keeps secrets when a Gateway config save fails, and pull request #187664, which keeps Gateway auth when Tailscale exposure is turned off. Before #187734, a timed-out settings save could write __OPENCLAW_REDACTED__ into openclaw.json and leave the next Gateway start failing until a Doctor repair and re-pair. Before #187664, choosing Off deleted the token, password and trusted-proxy settings while the app stayed connected.

Channel replies get a reliability pass: Telegram, Discord and webhook conversations "keep reaching the agent after request handlers or earlier turns finish." Conversations also survive more interruptions, including oversized turns that retain useful history and a stop of the first Claude CLI turn that no longer restarts the next message from scratch. Update recovery is called out as a highlight of its own: the notes say it "gets unstuck after crashed or canceled updaters, restores the Windows Gateway after failed verification, and avoids repeated full-database copying during large-state checks."

Elsewhere in Changes, Claude CLI can surface configured models from saved subscription accounts without a separate native login, with an opt-in for managed native Agent and Workflow tools that stays off by default. Control UI's model picker shows the configured active context budget rather than only the model maximum. Google Interactions honor managed proxy and TLS settings, and Bedrock Mantle routes numbered OpenAI GPT models to Responses while GPT-OSS stays on Chat Completions.

Network Tool Safety and Doctor Consent Land in Stable

Several security-shaped fixes that had been sitting on main are now in the stable package. The notes group them under "Network and tool safety": ClickClack and ClawHub reject redirects into unrelated private services, Discord CDN downloads no longer inherit browser private-network access, and FIFO native-hook credentials are rejected without hanging the agent. Matching pull requests include #190944 blocking ClickClack redirects to unrelated private services, #190939 blocking ClawHub archive redirects to private network targets, #191458 keeping browser private-network access out of Discord CDN downloads, and #191423 rejecting FIFO native-hook credentials without blocking.

Doctor also tightens unattended behavior. Pull request #191523 requires repair consent for unattended plugin downloads: openclaw doctor --non-interactive can no longer download provider plugin packages selected by an inherited API-key environment variable without --fix, --repair or --yes. Redirected-stdin Doctor runs get the same rule. Log redaction keeps built-in secret protection active when a malformed custom rule would previously disable valid rules, and secret egress rejects chains that rely on the distrusted emSign ECC G3 root in the managed proxy and exported subprocess CA bundle.

Tencent Hy4 Is Announced; Main and Docs Have It, 2026.11.1's Plugin Does Not

Yesterday morning's official product note was not about the stable cut. The official @openclaw post announcing Tencent Hy4 in OpenClaw, published at 9:35 AM Pacific on Tuesday, says Hy4 is "now supported," with "Vision, a 1M-token context window, and improved coding and long-horizon agent capabilities," available through Tencent TokenHub, TokenPlan and OpenRouter.

The code change that matches that announcement is pull request #191662, which adds hy4 to TokenHub and TokenPlan, merged on main at 12:53 AM Pacific on Tuesday. It promotes Hunyuan's GA hy4 into the bundled Tencent catalog alongside hy4-preview, with image input (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF; text output), a 1,024,000-token context window, a 960,000-token input ceiling, 64,000 max output, and listed prices of about $0.834 input / $2.501 output per million tokens. The default model on both endpoints stays hy4-preview; Doctor does not rewrite existing configs to hy4.

Live documentation already shows the GA rows. The Tencent Cloud TokenHub and TokenPlan provider page on docs.openclaw.ai lists tencent-tokenhub/hy4 and tencent-tokenplan/hy4 with text and image input. The same table is in the main-branch Tencent provider markdown in the OpenClaw repository. The tagged docs and plugin for 2026.11.1 still describe only hy4-preview and hy3: we checked the @openclaw/[email protected] package catalog on npm and found no GA hy4 row. OpenRouter, cited in the official post, already lists the model: the OpenRouter model page for Tencent Hy4 marks it released November 4, 2026, with a 1.0M context window, vision, and posted prices of $0.417 / $1.251 per million tokens (shown with a 50% off badge at fetch time).

ClawCast Episode 16 Walks Through Knowledge Without Shipping a New Beta

On the product side, OpenClaw published a long-form companion to yesterday's beta theme rather than another tag. The ClawCast Episode 16 page, Knowledge: A New Approach to Memory in OpenClaw, dates the recording to November 4, 2026, at 56 minutes 56 seconds, with hosts Hannes Rudolph and Patrick Erichsen and guest Josh Lehman of the OpenClaw Foundation. The episode page describes Knowledge as "an optional memory provider already included in OpenClaw, but not enabled by default," covering GBrain ideas, ingestion costs, a live demo of Scribes and consolidation, why Knowledge uses full-text search rather than embeddings, and a close on Advisor. The official @openclaw post for ClawCast Episode 16 went up at 6:20 PM Pacific on Tuesday.

We are not re-litigating 2026.11.5-beta.1 here. The useful operator takeaway from the episode page alone is that Knowledge remains optional and off by default even while the beta showcases Scribes. If you want the feature, treat the episode as orientation and keep production on 2026.11.1 or 2026.10.10 until you deliberately choose a beta Gateway.

Skill Card: summarize, for Podcasts, Links and Local Files

What to Watch Next

First, the next stable or beta cut that cherry-picks #191662 so TokenHub and TokenPlan users on npm get GA hy4 without tracking main. Second, whether 2026.11.5-beta.2 picks up yesterday's update-off-beta repair (#192546), which is still absent from 2026.11.1's cherry-picked set. Third, how OpenRouter's Hy4 listing and OpenClaw's OpenRouter provider stay in sync on model ids and vision. We'll recheck tags, npm dist-tags and the Tencent catalog on the next run.