OpenClaw — the self-hosted AI agent platform powering everything from Telegram bots to full content automation pipelines — has shipped v2026.3.13, a focused recovery release that patches critical session management bugs, improves Docker deployment, and delivers a redesigned Android experience.
💡 Hosting tip: For self-hosted setups, Contabo VPS for self-hosted AI agents offers high-performance VPS at excellent value.
If you’re running OpenClaw in production (especially on a VPS with Telegram or Discord channels), this update is worth deploying today.
What’s New in OpenClaw v2026.3.13
🔧 Critical Session & Delivery Fixes
The most important fixes in this release address session stability and message delivery reliability:
- Session compaction now correctly uses the full-session token count for post-compaction sanity checks, preventing false failures in long-running agent conversations.
- Session reset now properly preserves
lastAccountIdandlastThreadId— previously, resetting a session could break thread routing in Telegram and Discord. - Delivery dedupe edge cases have been resolved, reducing duplicate message delivery in high-traffic setups.
- Anthropic thinking blocks are now properly dropped on replay, preventing malformed prompts when resuming reasoning sessions.
🐳 Docker: Native Timezone Support
A long-requested feature lands in this release: OPENCLAW_TZ environment variable support in the official Docker image.
environment:
- OPENCLAW_TZ=Europe/BerlinThis ensures all scheduled cron jobs, heartbeat checks, and log timestamps use your local timezone rather than UTC — critical for anyone running content schedules or time-sensitive automations.
📱 Android: Redesigned Chat Settings
The OpenClaw Android companion app gets a fully redesigned chat settings UI, improving how users configure agent behavior on mobile. The new layout makes it easier to toggle features like voice mode, reasoning depth, and memory options from your phone.
🔒 Security & Compatibility
- Telegram SSRF hardening: Media processing now correctly threads through SSRF policy, closing a potential request-forgery surface.
- Memory file deduplication: The agent no longer injects memory files twice on case-insensitive file systems (relevant for macOS and Windows WSL mounts).
- OpenAI compat fixes: Explicit user-defined compatibility overrides are now respected for non-native openai-completions endpoints, improving third-party model routing.
- Discord gateway: Metadata fetch failures are now handled gracefully instead of crashing the channel monitor.
Why This Release Matters for Content Automation
If you’re using OpenClaw to run automated content pipelines — like the kind that power AI Stack Digest — the session fixes in 2026.3.13 directly affect reliability. Long-running cron agents that hit compaction limits will now recover cleanly rather than entering broken states.
The Docker timezone fix is equally important: cron jobs scheduled for “9:30 AM Berlin time” were previously at risk of running an hour off depending on DST and container timezone defaults. OPENCLAW_TZ solves this cleanly.
How to Update
# npm
npm update -g openclaw
# Or via OpenClaw's built-in updater
openclaw gateway updateCheck your current version with openclaw --version. The gateway will restart automatically after the update and ping your active session.
Want to Run OpenClaw on Your Own VPS?
OpenClaw is fully self-hosted — no subscriptions, no cloud lock-in. Your AI agent runs on your server, talks to your channels, and keeps your data private.
→ Full VPS Setup Guide
→ OpenClaw Hub: Security, Skills & Setups
→ OpenClaw Version Log
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This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by the AIStackDigest editorial team.