The Reef.
The Reef is the open-source cooperative ecosystem the Claw-family clients plug into. It provides the admission gate that verifies candidate skills, the manifest format every Claw-family client speaks, the governance layer that keeps the cooperative answerable, and the chronicle that records what happened.
Open by design so no single supplier — including The Dark Factory Ltd, its commercial steward — can lock anyone in.
What's inside the Reef
Pincers
The admission gate. Verifies candidate skills against a nine-layer policy before any is admitted to the trusted library.
Apache 2.0The .claw format
Signed-JSON skill manifest format. The portable, verifiable shape of a Reef-admitted skill.
Open specCarapace
The constitutional / governance layer. Keeps the cooperative, its operators, and its clients answerable to a stated set of virtues and offences.
Open sourceLobster King Chronicle
The narrative layer — fables and arcs recording what the Reef has done, what it has admitted, what it has refused.
CC BY 4.0Claw-family downloads
Three clients, one cooperative. Each speaks the same .claw
manifest format and connects to the same Reef. They differ in what
they bring locally — inference path, verification strength, platform.
Grapple
macOS · Apple SiliconOpenClaw + on-device Apple Foundation Models inference. The lowest-friction Reef client for Apple-platform users — no GPU, no API key, no network round-trip for inference.
DownloadSteelClaw
Coming soonOpenClaw with a SPARK-Ada-verified skill admission gate. Every safety-relevant line of the gate is gnatprove-discharged. The Claw-family client for classified or regulated networks. Commercial product of The Dark Factory Ltd.
Register interestOpenClaw
Cross-platform · open sourceThe base Go client. Cross-platform, open source, easy to install. The reference implementation every other Claw-family client extends.
Notify meSo no supplier — including the steward — can lock anyone in
Anyone adopting formally-verified or admission-gated software has a legitimate concern: what happens if our supplier disappears, raises prices, or stops maintaining the tooling?
The Reef answers that concern by being open by design. The admission gate, the manifest format, the governance layer are all open source. Another supplier — in principle — can build their own tooling that plugs into the same Reef and produces output the same admission gate accepts. The Reef's commercial steward sells production capability; the verification and trust substrate sits outside any single party's IP.
It also means independent inspection. Anyone — auditor, external researcher, hostile party — can read every line of the verification layer that says this is safe. That's a stronger guarantee than any closed-source vendor's word.