deadclaw
Emergency kill switch for OpenClaw agents. Instantly halts all running agents, pauses scheduled jobs, kills active sessions, and logs everything — triggered by a single message, a WebChat button, or a phone home screen shortcut. Includes a background watchdog that auto-kills agents on runaway loops, excessive token spend, unauthorized network calls, or out-of-bounds file writes. Use this skill whenever the user mentions: emergency stop, kill switch, stop agents, halt agents, panic button, deadclaw, agent safety, runaway agent, kill all, stop everything, or any urgent need to shut down OpenClaw processes immediately.
Install via CLI (Recommended)
clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/kintupercy/deadclawDeadClaw — Emergency Kill Switch for OpenClaw Agents
"One tap. Everything stops."
DeadClaw is a single-purpose emergency kill switch. When triggered, it immediately halts all running OpenClaw agent processes, stops Docker containers, pauses all scheduled cron jobs and heartbeats, kills all active sessions, and writes a timestamped incident log. It then confirms back to whichever surface triggered it.
Works with both native OpenClaw installs and Docker-based deployments (Hostinger VPS, etc.). Auto-detects your setup.
Why DeadClaw Exists
The ClawHavoc attack (February 2026) exposed 1,184 malicious skills in the OpenClaw ecosystem. People run agents autonomously — often overnight, often unattended. When something goes wrong, you need a way to stop everything from wherever you are, even from your phone. DeadClaw is that way.
Activation Methods
DeadClaw supports three activation methods. All three execute the exact same kill sequence — the only difference is how the user triggers it.
Method 1: Message Trigger
The user sends a trigger word to any connected OpenClaw channel (Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, or any other connected channel). The following words activate DeadClaw:
killorKILLdeadstop everythingemergency stopdeadclaw🔴
When a trigger word is detected:
- Execute
scripts/kill.shfrom the DeadClaw skill directory - Capture the output (process count, containers stopped, cron jobs paused, timestamp)
- Send confirmation back to the same channel the trigger came from:
🔴 DeadClaw activated. All agents stopped. [timestamp] — [X] killed ([X] processes, [X] containers). [X] cron jobs paused. See deadclaw.log for full report.
Method 2: WebChat Kill Button
A persistent red button rendered in the OpenClaw WebChat dashboard. The HTML widget
is located at ui/deadclaw-button.html. It calls kill.sh via OpenClaw's WebChat
API hooks (window.OpenClaw.exec()). If the WebChat hooks are unavailable, the
button degrades to showing an error message with manual instructions.
To embed the button, use OpenClaw's WebChat customization hooks:
OpenClaw.WebChat.registerWidget('deadclaw-button', {
src: 'skills/deadclaw/ui/deadclaw-button.html',
position: 'top-bar',
persistent: true
});
Method 3: Phone Home Screen Shortcut
A pre-built shortcut that sends the kill trigger message (deadclaw) to the user's
configured Telegram bot. Setup guides for iOS and Android are in docs/:
docs/iphone-shortcut-guide.md— iOS Shortcuts setupdocs/android-widget-guide.md— Android widget setup (Tasker or HTTP Shortcuts)
Watchdog (Passive Protection)
DeadClaw includes a background watchdog (scripts/watchdog.sh) that monitors for
dangerous conditions and auto-triggers the kill without any user action.
The watchdog checks every 60 seconds for (after a 5-minute startup grace period):
Metadata
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Find the right skillPaste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.
{
"plugins": {
"official-kintupercy-deadclaw": {
"enabled": true,
"auto_update": true
}
}
}