Is Goclaw Safe?
Goclaw — Nerq Trust Score 69.1/100 (C grade). Score based on 5 independent trust signals.
Goclaw is a software tool with a Nerq Trust Score of 69.1/100 (C), based on 5 independent data dimensions. Security: 0/100. Maintenance: 1/100. Popularity: 1/100. Data sourced from multiple public sources including package registries, GitHub, NVD, OSV.dev, and OpenSSF Scorecard. Last updated: n/a. Machine-readable data (JSON).
Is Goclaw safe?
Trust Score Breakdown — Goclaw has a Nerq Trust Score of 69.1/100 (C). Measured across 5 independent trust signals.
What is Goclaw's trust score?
Goclaw has a Nerq Trust Score of 69.1/100, earning a C grade. This score is based on 5 independently measured dimensions including security, maintenance, and community adoption.
What are the key security findings for Goclaw?
Goclaw's strongest signal is compliance at 84/100. No known vulnerabilities have been detected.
What is Goclaw and who maintains it?
| Author | smallnest |
| Category | Agent Framework |
| Stars | 143 |
| Source | https://github.com/smallnest/goclaw |
| Frameworks | openai · anthropic |
| Protocols | rest |
Regulatory Compliance
| EU AI Act Risk Class | Not assessed |
| Compliance Score | 84/100 |
| Jurisdictions | Assessed across 52 jurisdictions |
Popular Alternatives in agent_framework
Goclaw Across Platforms
Same developer/company in other registries:
What Is Goclaw?
Goclaw is a framework for building autonomous AI agents: An open-source AI assistant framework in Go.. It has 143 GitHub stars. Nerq Trust Score: 69/100 (C).
Nerq independently analyzes every software tool, app, and extension across multiple trust signals including security vulnerabilities, maintenance activity, license compliance, and community adoption.
How Nerq Assesses Goclaw's Safety
Nerq's Trust Score is calculated from 13+ independent signals aggregated into five dimensions. Here is how Goclaw performs in each:
- Security (0/100): Goclaw's security posture is poor. This score factors in known CVEs, dependency vulnerabilities, security policy presence, and code signing practices.
- Maintenance (1/100): Goclaw is potentially abandoned. We track commit frequency, release cadence, issue response times, and PR merge rates.
- Documentation (1/100): Documentation quality is insufficient. This includes README completeness, API documentation, usage examples, and contribution guidelines.
- Compliance (84/100): Goclaw is broadly compliant. Assessed against regulations in 52 jurisdictions including the EU AI Act, CCPA, and GDPR.
- Community (1/100): Community adoption is limited. Based on GitHub stars, forks, download counts, and ecosystem integrations.
The overall Trust Score of 69.1/100 (C) is the weighted combination of these measured signals. It is a measurement, not a pass/fail or suitability judgment — weigh the individual signals against your own requirements.
Who Typically Evaluates Goclaw?
Goclaw is commonly evaluated by:
- AI engineers building autonomous agent systems
- Research teams experimenting with multi-agent architectures
- Companies creating AI-powered automation workflows
How to read the signals: Goclaw's measured signals (security 0/100, maintenance 1/100, documentation 1/100, community 1/100) are shown above. These are measurements, not a suitability judgment — weigh each signal against the requirements of your own use case and risk tolerance.
How to Verify Goclaw's Safety Yourself
While Nerq provides automated trust analysis, we recommend these additional steps before adopting any software tool:
- Check the source code — Review the repository's security policy, open issues, and recent commits for signs of active maintenance.
- Scan dependencies — Use tools like
npm audit,pip-audit, orsnykto check for known vulnerabilities in Goclaw's dependency tree. - Review permissions — Understand what access Goclaw requires. Software tools should follow the principle of least privilege.
- Test in isolation — Run Goclaw in a sandboxed environment before granting access to production data or systems.
- Monitor continuously — Use Nerq's API to set up automated trust checks:
GET nerq.ai/v1/preflight?target=goclaw - Review the license — Confirm that Goclaw's license is compatible with your intended use case. Pay attention to restrictions on commercial use, redistribution, and derivative works. Some AI tools use dual licensing or have separate terms for enterprise customers that differ from the open-source license.
- Check community signals — Look at the project's issue tracker, discussion forums, and social media presence. A healthy community actively reports bugs, contributes fixes, and discusses security concerns openly. Low community engagement may indicate limited peer review of the codebase.
Common Safety Concerns with Goclaw
When evaluating whether Goclaw is safe, consider these category-specific risks:
Agent frameworks like Goclaw can take actions autonomously — executing code, calling APIs, modifying files. Always implement guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls for production deployments.
AI agents built with Goclaw may be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks where malicious input causes the agent to take unintended actions. Test for adversarial inputs before deploying.
Autonomous agents can incur unexpected API costs or resource usage. Set budget limits and monitoring alerts when deploying Goclaw-based agents.
When using Goclaw to orchestrate multiple agents, failures in inter-agent communication can lead to cascading errors, duplicated actions, or deadlocks. Implement circuit breakers and timeout mechanisms to prevent runaway agent loops that can consume resources indefinitely.
Agents built with Goclaw that persist memory across sessions can have their context poisoned by adversarial inputs. Once corrupted, the agent may make consistently poor decisions in future interactions. Implement memory validation and periodic context resets for long-running agents.
Best Practices for Using Goclaw Safely
Whether you're an individual developer or an enterprise team, these practices will help you get the most from Goclaw while minimizing risk:
Configure Goclaw agents to require human approval for high-impact actions like payments, data deletion, or external API calls.
Autonomous agents built with Goclaw can incur unexpected costs through API calls and resource usage. Set hard spending limits and rate caps.
Log all actions taken by agents built with Goclaw. Use observability tools to detect anomalous behavior patterns that could indicate prompt injection or logic errors.
Before deploying Goclaw-based agents in production, test with adversarial prompts designed to bypass guardrails and cause unintended actions.
Each agent should have the minimum permissions required. Never give an agent root access, admin credentials, or unrestricted API keys.
Situations That Warrant Independent Review of Goclaw
Nerq's signals are one input. In the following situations, evaluate Goclaw's measured signals against your own requirements before making a decision:
- Environments handling sensitive or regulated data (healthcare, finance, government)
- Mission-critical systems where downtime has significant business impact
- Deployments with strict regulatory requirements that must be independently validated
For each situation, compare Goclaw's measured trust score of 69.1/100 and its individual signals against your organization's own criteria. Nerq does not assert whether Goclaw is suitable for any particular use.
How Goclaw Compares to Industry Standards
Nerq indexes over 6 million software tools, apps, and packages across dozens of categories. Among agent frameworks, the average Trust Score is 65/100. Goclaw's score of 69.1/100 is above the category average of 65/100.
This positions Goclaw favorably among agent frameworks. While it outperforms the average, there is still room for improvement in certain trust dimensions.
Industry benchmarks matter because they contextualize a tool's safety profile. A score that looks moderate in isolation may actually represent strong performance within a challenging category — or vice versa. Nerq's category-relative analysis helps teams make informed decisions by showing not just absolute quality, but how a tool ranks against its direct peers.
Trust Score History
Nerq continuously monitors Goclaw and recalculates its Trust Score as new data becomes available. Our scoring engine ingests real-time signals from source repositories, vulnerability databases (NVD, OSV.dev), package registries, and community metrics. When a new CVE is published, a major release ships, or maintenance patterns change, Goclaw's score is updated within 24 hours.
Historical trust trends reveal whether a tool is improving, stable, or declining over time. A tool that consistently maintains or improves its score demonstrates ongoing commitment to security and quality. Conversely, a downward trend may signal reduced maintenance, growing technical debt, or unresolved vulnerabilities. To track Goclaw's score over time, use the Nerq API: GET nerq.ai/v1/preflight?target=goclaw&include=history
Nerq retains trust score snapshots at regular intervals, enabling trend analysis across weeks and months. Enterprise users can access detailed historical reports showing how each dimension — security, maintenance, documentation, compliance, and community — has evolved independently, providing granular visibility into which aspects of Goclaw are strengthening or weakening over time.
Goclaw vs Alternatives
In the agent_framework category, Goclaw scores 69.1/100. There are higher-scoring alternatives available. For a detailed comparison, see:
- Goclaw vs hashbrown — Trust Score: 68.0/100
- Goclaw vs AutoAgents — Trust Score: 71.5/100
- Goclaw vs LoongFlow — Trust Score: 75.8/100
Key Takeaways
- Goclaw has a measured Nerq Trust Score of 69.1/100 (C) — a composite of independent signals, not a suitability judgment.
- Among agent frameworks, Goclaw scores above the category average of 65/100 (a positional measurement relative to peers).
- The individual signals — security, maintenance, documentation, compliance, community — are shown above. Weigh them against your own requirements.
- Query the current measured values via Nerq's Preflight API.
Frequently Asked Questions
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See Also
Disclaimer: Nerq trust scores are automated measurements based on publicly available signals. They are not endorsements, verdicts, or guarantees of suitability. Always evaluate the signals against your own requirements.