ClawHosters
by Daniel Samer
3 min read
76 contributors shipped OpenClaw v2026.3.1 on March 2, with 50+ issues closed and three changes that affect how your instance talks to AI providers.
If you're on ClawHosters, all of this is already live. You don't need to touch anything.
Claude 4.6 Gets Adaptive Thinking by Default
OpenClaw now sends thinking.type: "adaptive" when calling Claude Opus 4.6 or Sonnet 4.6. The old budget_tokens approach? Anthropic deprecated it for these models.
What adaptive thinking actually does: instead of burning a fixed token budget on every request, the model decides whether to reason deeply or skip thinking entirely. A simple factual question won't waste tokens on reasoning it doesn't need. A complex multi-step agent task gets deeper analysis automatically.
For other models, nothing changed. They keep their previous default of low. This only affects Claude 4.6 specifically.
OpenAI WebSocket Streaming Replaces HTTP
The OpenAI Responses API transport flipped from HTTP to WebSocket-first. SSE is still there as a fallback if the WebSocket connection fails.
Why this matters: every tool-call round trip used to spin up a full HTTP request. For agents running 20+ tool calls in a workflow, that overhead adds up fast. According to benchmarks cited in the implementation discussion, persistent WebSocket connections cut end-to-end execution time by roughly 40% for those heavy workflows.
The default is transport: auto, which tries WebSocket first. You probably don't need to configure anything.
Native Kubernetes Health Probes
OpenClaw v2026.3.1 ships four built-in endpoints: /health, /healthz, /ready, and /readyz. Before this, anyone running OpenClaw on Kubernetes had to use TCP socket probes or build custom sidecars. The community k8s-operator project has been working around this limitation for months.
If you already had a plugin handling those paths, it still works. The built-in endpoints only activate when no other handler claims the route.
For ClawHosters users, this is how the platform monitors your instance health behind the scenes.
Other Notable Changes
Feishu/Lark got meaningful Docx improvements: create_table, upload_image, and upload_file actions. The new OPENCLAW_SHELL environment variable lets shell startup scripts detect when they're running inside OpenClaw. And a secrets/auth normalization fix quietly resolves edge cases where credential profiles weren't persisting correctly.
Your managed instance on ClawHosters was updated automatically. If you want to check what's new in your dashboard or read more about self-hosted vs. managed differences, those resources are there. For the full changelog, see the v2026.3.1 release notes.
