OpenClaw Secrets: Give Agents Keys They Never See

OpenClaw 2.0 landed on August 30, 2026 as v2026.8.1 — the project's largest release ever, with 933 contributors and more than 16,000 pull requests merged. Most of the coverage went to the rebuilt browser app and shared cloud sessions. The feature that actually changes how you build agents got almost no attention.

It is a tool called secrets. It lets an agent ask you for an API key, use that key to make real HTTP requests, and never once see the value. Not in the chat. Not in the transcript. Not in the model's context window.