Sipeed's PicoClaw is a new open source personal AI assistant designed to run on hardware so minimal it makes a Raspberry Pi look extravagant. Built in Go and requiring less than 10 MB of RAM, PicoClaw can handle email triage, calendar management, and flight check-ins from Telegram or Discord, all while running on a RISC-V single-board computer that costs as little as $10 (€9). It boots in under one second on a 600 MHz core and ships as a single self-contained binary for RISC-V, ARM, and x86.
PicoClaw traces its lineage through two earlier projects. OpenClaw, the original personal AI assistant, requires over 1 GB of RAM and more than 500 seconds to start on an 800 MHz core, making it impractical for anything cheaper than a Mac Mini. HKUDS then created nanobot, a Python rewrite that trimmed the codebase from 430,000+ lines to roughly 4,000 and dropped RAM requirements to around 100 MB. PicoClaw takes the concept further with a full rewrite in Go, cutting memory usage by another order of magnitude. Notably, the project claims 95% of its core code was generated by an AI agent through a self-bootstrapping migration process, with human developers providing refinement and oversight.
The assistant connects to external LLM providers (you supply your own API keys) and optionally integrates Brave Search for web lookups, configured through a simple JSON file. Prebuilt binaries are available for RISCV64 Linux, ARM64 Linux, AMD64 Linux, and AMD64 Windows on the project's GitHub releases page. For anyone with a spare SBC gathering dust in a drawer, PicoClaw offers a genuinely useful application that finally matches the "low-power always-on server" pitch these tiny boards have promised for years.
The sub-$10 RISC-V boards that PicoClaw targets have a growing, if still maturing, software ecosystem. Armbian now lists several Sipeed boards as community-maintained targets, and Alpine Linux added official riscv64 support starting with version 3.20, giving self-hosters a lightweight base OS that pairs naturally with Go binaries like PicoClaw. DietPi has experimental RISC-V images for boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, with expanded support introduced throughout 2025. For boards built around Allwinner's D1 SoC (such as the Sipeed LicheeRV Dock and Nezha), Sipeed ships a Tina Linux SDK based on OpenWrt, and community images for Debian and Buildroot are available as well.
Because Go cross-compiles cleanly to riscv64, the same boards can run other single-binary self-hosted tools alongside PicoClaw. Projects built in Go or distributed as static binaries are generally the easiest path to getting useful services onto these memory-constrained devices. Mainline Linux kernel support for RISC-V SoCs is steadily improving, though driver coverage for peripherals like GPU, USB, and PCIe still varies by chip. If you are choosing a board specifically to run PicoClaw, sticking with one that has upstream or Armbian support will save time on OS setup and leave you free to focus on configuring the assistant itself.
