OpenClaw Daily News Roundup: 2026-04-22

This roundup includes only OpenClaw project news for 2026-04-22 (no competitor coverage).

Official releases published

v2026.4.21

• OpenAI/images: default the bundled image-generation provider and live media smoke tests to gpt-image-2, and advertise the newer 2K/4K OpenAI size hints in image-generation docs and tool metadata.
• Plugins/doctor: repair bundled plugin runtime dependencies from doctor paths so packaged installs can recover missing channel/provider dependencies without broad core dependency installs.
• Image generation: log failed provider/model candidates at warn level before automatic provider fallback, so OpenAI image failures are visible in the gateway log even when a later provider succeeds.
• Auth/commands: require owner identity (an owner-candidate match or internal operator.admin) for owner-enforced commands instead of treating wildcard channel allowFrom or empty owner-candidate lists as sufficient, so non-owner senders can no longer reach owner-only commands through a permissive fallback when enforceOwnerForCommands=true and commands.ownerAllowFrom is unset. (#69774) Thanks @drobison00.
• Slack: preserve thread aliases in runtime outbound sends so generic runtime sends stay in the intended Slack thread when the caller supplies threadTs. (#62947) Thanks @bek91.
• Browser: reject invalid ax<N> accessibility refs in act paths immediately instead of waiting for the browser action timeout. (#69924) Thanks @Patrick-Erichsen.
• npm/install: mirror the node-domexception alias into root package.json overrides, so npm installs stop surfacing the deprecated google-auth-library -> gaxios -> node-fetch -> fetch-blob -> node-domexception chain pulled through Pi/Google runtime deps. Thanks @vincentkoc.

Source: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.4.21

Notes

• Competitor news is intentionally excluded from this daily roundup format.