OpenClaw as Language Infrastructure: A Case-Centered Survey of a Public Agent Ecosystem in the Wild

Public agent ecosystems are emerging as a new object of study in NLP: settings in which language models not only generate text but also act, coordinate, authenticate, exchange reusable capabilities, and leave durable public traces. Using the OpenClaw–Moltbook ecosystem as a strategically revealing case, we survey a curated corpus of 38 ecosystem-specific papers and reports available as of 10-03-2026, together with official platform materials and adjacent survey literature. We provide a case-centered, NLP-centered survey of a public agent ecosystem in the wild. We argue that this case is best understood as language infrastructure: linguistic artifacts are executable, persistent, public, portable, and increasingly governance-bearing. We introduce GATE — Grounding, Action, Transfer, and Exchange — to organize what language does in public agent ecosystems, and pair it with AERO — Authority, Enablement, Reach, and Orchestration — to track how language acquires delegated operational force. Across the corpus, the main methodological bottleneck is weak triangulation across trajectories, discourse, portable artifacts, and grounding signals. That bottleneck yields four recurring fault lines: instruction is mistaken for authority, visible agent speech is mistaken for autonomous speakerhood, public claims outrun verification, and local control is mistaken for lower risk. We conclude with an NLP agenda centered on executable pragmatics, delegated-agent discourse analysis, provenance-aware evaluation, privacy-preserving agent NLP, multilingual public-agent research, and autonomy-sensitive benchmarks. We will release all artifacts once permitted.