Red Hat principal software engineer Sally O’Malley released an open source tool called Tank OS on Tuesday, April 29, 2026, designed to make deploying and managing OpenClaw AI agents safer and easier — particularly for IT professionals running large numbers of them across corporate environments.
OpenClaw is an open source project that installs an AI agent on a local computer. Tank OS wraps OpenClaw inside a Podman container — a “rootless” container tool developed at Red Hat that grants no elevated privileges to the underlying machine — and loads it onto Red Hat’s Fedora Linux OS as a bootable image. When the computer starts, OpenClaw launches automatically.
The tool bundles everything needed for unsupervised operation, including state memory, API key storage, and other supporting features. Multiple Tank OS instances can run on a single machine for separate tasks, with no sharing of credentials between them and no access to other processes on the host computer.
O’Malley is an OpenClaw maintainer, meaning she works alongside project creator Peter Steinberger — who was hired by OpenAI but continues to lead the independent open source project — on feature and bug decisions. Her focus within OpenClaw is enterprise use cases and compatibility with Red Hat’s Linux distributions.
She built Tank OS with enterprise scale in mind. “My role within OpenClaw is really my interest in it,” O’Malley said. “How it’s going to look scaled out when there are millions of these autonomous agents talking to one another.” The tool allows IT teams to update agents using the same container management workflows they already use.
O’Malley noted that OpenClaw, while powerful, “can also be dangerous if not configured properly” and is not suited for users without technical experience. Tank OS is similarly aimed at technically proficient users. The tool is not the only containerized OpenClaw implementation — NanoClaw uses Docker for a comparable approach — but Tank OS is positioned specifically for Red Hat’s enterprise customer base.
Source: TechCrunch