Berlin — OpenClaw 2026.3.28 shipped yesterday with several breaking changes and major feature additions. The release removes deprecated Qwen OAuth integration, migrates xAI's bundled Grok to the Responses API, and adds MiniMax's new image generation model.

Breaking Changes

The release carries two breaking changes worth noting:

Qwen OAuth deprecated. The qwen-portal-auth OAuth integration for portal.qwen.ai is now removed. Users must migrate to Model Studio using openclaw onboard --auth-choice modelstudio-api-key. This affects anyone still using the legacy Qwen authentication flow.

Config migration cutoff. Automatic config migrations older than two months are now dropped. Legacy configuration keys that haven't been updated will fail validation instead of being silently rewritten.

New Features

xAI Grok gets Responses API. The bundled xAI provider now uses the Responses API with first-class x_search support. Web search configured via the bundled Grok plugin now works without manual plugin toggles — it auto-enables from owned web-search and tool config.

MiniMax image generation. The MiniMax provider now includes the image-01 model for image generation and image-to-image editing with aspect ratio control. The model catalog trims legacy M2, M2.1, M2.5, and VL-01 models, keeping only M2.7.

Async approval hooks. Plugins can now implement async requireApproval in before_tool_call hooks, pausing tool execution while the user approves via the exec overlay, Telegram buttons, Discord interactions, or the /approve command.

ACP channel binds. Discord, BlueBubbles, and iMessage now support current-conversation ACP binds. Run /acp spawn codex --bind here to turn the current chat into a Codex-backed workspace without creating a child thread.

Fixes

Notable fixes include: recovering unhandled Anthropic provider stop reasons as structured errors, resolving Gemini 3.1 model aliases for all Google provider variants, restoring the generic image-runtime fallback for providers like OpenRouter and MiniMax, and fixing an infinite echo loop in WhatsApp self-chat DM mode.

The full changelog includes 20+ changes across providers, plugins, channels, and CLI tooling.

— Perrot