opinion Beloved British single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi has achieved meme stock stardom, as its share price surged 90 percent over the course of a couple of days earlier this week. It’s settled since, but it’s still up more than 30 percent on the week.
The trigger for this rally? The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, “aleabitoreddit,” that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis.
The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook.
More level-headed voices have already flagged a wave of security vulnerabilities.
In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web. That’s not just our opinion, it’s one shared by the multitude of security experts El Reg has talked to about OpenClaw over the past few weeks, with some describing it as “an infostealer malware disguised as an AI personal assistant.”
In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster everyone is losing their minds over. After all, Raspberry Pi made a name for itself by cramming just enough compute into a cute, credit card-sized package to be useful, and it cost less than a couple of movie tickets and a bucket of popcorn. Or … at least it used to.
If you haven’t noticed, Raspberry Pis aren’t that cheap anymore thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago.
What’s more, the Raspberry Pi 5’s Broadcom BCM2712 is fabbed on ancient 16 nm process tech and uses an Arm core that dates back to before the pandemic. The Raspberry Pi wasn’t meant to be fast, just cheap, and it’s not even that anymore.
Sure, OpenClaw forks like PicoClaw have made it possible to run the agent on low-end Raspberry Pis, but the thing still needs to phone home to an API service for large language model (LLM) access. Local LLMs can work for OpenClaw, but you won’t be running them on a Raspberry Pi. Even running them on a maxed-out Mac Mini is asking a lot of the hardware.
You know what’s cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud (VPC). Just remember to configure the firewall and spin up new credentials in case it gets compromised.
There is no shortage of VPC instances preconfigured to run OpenClaw that can be rented for a few bucks a month and shut down at any time if or when OpenClaw doesn’t live up to the hype.
But if for some reason you prefer to keep your weapons of mass stupidity close at hand, at least you’ll have a Pi lying around to power your next hobbyist project, perhaps for something that can’t email your boss or drain your bank account.
Oh, and when Raspberry Pi’s share price comes crashing back to reality, don’t say we didn’t warn you. ®
