Red Hat packages OpenClaw into Tank OS to isolate AI agents
Red Hat engineer Sally O’Malley packaged OpenClaw into Tank OS, a bootable open-source image that runs each AI agent in unprivileged Podman containers with separate credentials.
Sally O’Malley, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, packaged the OpenClaw agent framework into Tank OS, an open-source bootable system image. Each agent runs in an unprivileged Podman container to keep credentials separate and prevent agents from accessing the host or other agents. O’Malley developed the initial implementation over a weekend.
Tank OS is distributed as a full operating system snapshot that administrators can push to cloud servers, virtual machines or physical hardware. Machines that boot from the image receive the same operating system and agent configuration. Administrators apply updates by replacing the image and rebooting, eliminating manual installs or piecemeal patching across fleets.
Podman manages each OpenClaw instance without administrator privileges, which prevents container processes from reaching the host. Tank OS stores API keys and other credentials separately for each container instance so one agent cannot read another agent’s secrets.
Security concerns prompted the work. Independent audits found roughly 12 to 20 percent of ClawHub add-ons were flagged as malicious. A high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-25253, disclosed in late January received a severity score of 8.8 and allowed a single-click webpage attack that could expose login credentials and let an attacker take control of a machine. The patch shipped on January 30. More than 17,500 exposed OpenClaw instances were vulnerable before the fix.
Tank OS is published at github.com/LobsterTrap/tank-os and is intended for enterprise deployments. O’Malley, an OpenClaw maintainer focused on enterprise use and Red Hat’s Linux ecosystem, described her role as ‘My role within OpenClaw is really my interest in it. How it’s going to look scaled out when there are millions of these autonomous agents talking to one another.’
By running agents unprivileged in containers and isolating credentials per instance, Tank OS is built to limit any compromise to the container boundary and to prevent access to host systems or sibling agents.
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