OpenClaw v2026.3.12 shipped on March 12th. This is a bigger release than the version number implies — a ground-up UI overhaul, two security advisories, and enough model-layer fixes to make Kimi users particularly happy.

The Headlines

Control UI v2. The gateway dashboard has been rebuilt from scratch. You now get modular views for Overview, Chat, Config, Agent, and Sessions, a command palette, mobile-friendly bottom tabs, and a meaningfully richer chat surface: slash commands, message search, export, and pinned messages. If you've been running the old dashboard and wondering when it would feel finished — this is that moment.

Fast Mode, unified. /fast is now a first-class session-level toggle across TUI, Control UI, and ACP. For OpenAI it shapes Codex requests directly; for Anthropic it maps to service_tier on direct API-key sessions. Both come with live tier verification, so you'll know immediately if your account actually supports it. Per-model config defaults round it out.

Provider plugin architecture for Ollama, vLLM, and SGLang. These three are now proper provider plugins with their own onboarding flows, discovery, model-picker setup, and post-selection hooks. Core provider wiring gets cleaner with every one of these that moves out.

sessions_yield for orchestrators. Adds a new primitive that lets orchestrators end the current turn immediately, skip queued tool work, and carry a hidden follow-up payload into the next session turn. Useful for complex multi-step agent flows where you need a clean handoff without side effects.

Slack Block Kit messages. Agents can now send native Block Kit messages through the standard Slack outbound delivery path via channelData.slack.blocks. Plain text was fine; structured cards are better.

Kubernetes starter path. Raw manifests, Kind setup, and full deployment docs are now part of the repo. If you've been waiting for an official K8s install path before moving OpenClaw into your cluster, the wait is over.

Security — Read These

Two advisories in this release. Both are worth updating for immediately.

GHSA-99qw-6mr3-36qr — Implicit workspace plugin auto-load disabled. Previously, cloning a repository that contained workspace plugins would cause them to execute automatically. That's now behind an explicit trust gate. No plugin code runs from a cloned repo without your sign-off.

GHSA-pcqg-f7rg-xfvv — Invisible Unicode escaping in exec-approval prompts. Invisible Unicode characters in tool arguments could be used to display a benign-looking approval prompt while executing something else entirely. These characters are now rendered as \u{...} literals in all approval surfaces, so what you approve is what runs.

Notable Fixes

The Kimi Coding tool-call regression gets resolved here: kimi-coding was degrading structured tool_use blocks into XML pseudo-invocations instead of sending them in native Anthropic format. Fixed — tool calls are real again.

TUI duplicate assistant replies are gone. The chat log now reuses the active assistant message component across streaming runs instead of creating a new one per chunk.

Gateway routing gets a correction that prevented TUI and other mode:UI sessions from accidentally inheriting a persisted Telegram or WhatsApp delivery route when deliver was enabled.

BlueBubbles self-chat echo dedup is now surgical: it only drops a reflected webhook copy when a matching fromMe event was just seen for the same chat, body, and timestamp. No more broad suppression that was silently swallowing unrelated messages.

Other fixes: Mattermost block streaming no longer double-posts to both thread and top-level, openclaw update on Windows no longer fails on missing git or node-llama-cpp, sandboxed write no longer creates empty files with a false success status, and Moonshot CN API keys authenticating against api.moonshot.cn no longer return HTTP 401.

Bottom Line

v2026.3.12 is the kind of release where the headline feature (Control UI v2) would normally carry the whole announcement — but the two security advisories make this a mandatory update regardless. Apply it, then enjoy the dashboard.

Full changelog: GitHub Release