March has been a busy month for OpenClaw. If you've been running an agent and noticed things feeling smoother, faster, or more secure, you're not imagining it. The team shipped some serious upgrades.
Here's what landed and why you should care.
Native PDF Analysis
Your agent can now read PDFs without plugins or workarounds.
Drop an invoice, a contract, or a 50-page report into a conversation and the agent processes it natively. It routes to Anthropic or Google's PDF providers when available, falls back to extraction for other models.
You can configure defaults through agents.defaults.pdfModel, set size limits with pdfMaxBytesMb, and cap page counts with pdfMaxPages. The whole thing is tested and documented.
Why this matters: before this update, getting an agent to read a PDF meant cobbling together extraction scripts or copy-pasting text. Now it just works. Hand your agent a vendor contract and ask "what are the payment terms?" That's a real workflow now.
SecretRef Security Overhaul
This one's less flashy but arguably more important.
SecretRef support now covers 64 credential targets across the entire platform. Runtime collectors, secrets planning, audit flows, onboarding UX - all of it. If you reference a secret that doesn't exist on an active surface, the system fails fast instead of silently proceeding with missing credentials.
Translation: your agent won't accidentally operate with missing or expired credentials anymore. And when something is wrong, you'll know immediately.
Inline File Attachments for Sub-Agents
sessions_spawn now accepts inline file attachments with base64 or UTF-8 encoding. When a parent agent spawns a sub-agent, it can pass files directly. No temp directories, no shared filesystem hacks.
If you're building multi-agent workflows, this removes a friction point that used to require ugly workarounds.
Telegram Streaming by Default
New Telegram setups now get live preview streaming out of the box. Instead of waiting for the full response, users see the agent "typing" its reply in real time. Small change, big difference in responsiveness.
Multi-Media Message Support
Outbound adapters across Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, and Zalo now share a unified sendPayload system. Mixed media messages iterate cleanly with graceful text fallback.
MiniMax-M2.5-highspeed
New model support. Fast inference at lower cost. Legacy configs still work.
What's Coming
- Improved memory search with local Ollama support
- Better skill discovery through ClawhHub
- Enhanced browser automation
Should You Update?
Yes. The security improvements alone are worth it. The PDF tool is a genuine workflow unlock. And Telegram streaming makes your agent feel twice as fast.
If you're on an older version and want help upgrading, that's literally what we do. Book a call and we'll handle the migration.
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