Running an Autonomous Personal AI Agent with OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail

AWS has announced the general availability of OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail. Newly created Lightsail instances come pre-configured with Amazon Bedrock as the default AI model provider, so once setup is complete you can start chatting with the AI assistant immediately with no additional configuration.

OpenClaw is an open-source, self-hosted, browser-based autonomous personal AI agent that goes beyond simple Q&A—it can integrate with messaging apps like WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram to handle tasks such as managing email, browsing the web, and organizing files.

The getting-started process is relatively straightforward.

• Create an instance in the Lightsail console, choose a Region and Availability Zone, then select the OpenClaw blueprint under the Linux/Unix platform.
• You can choose an instance plan, and the 4 GB memory plan is recommended for optimal performance.
• After creation, connect via Connect using SSH, copy the dashboard URL and security credentials shown in the guidance message, and paste them into the Gateway Token field on the OpenClaw dashboard.
• In the SSH terminal, press y and then a to approve device pairing, which completes the connection and shows the status as OK.
• Then, in AWS CloudShell, run the script found under the Getting started tab to enable Bedrock API access, and start using the assistant from the Chat tab.

Several operational cautions were also noted. IAM permissions consist of roles and policies that include Bedrock access, and while they can be modified, incorrect changes may block response generation. Costs include both the hourly rate for the Lightsail instance and Bedrock's token-based billing, and using Marketplace models such as Anthropic Claude or Cohere may incur additional software charges.

On the security side, it's emphasized that the gateway should not be exposed to the public internet, and the gateway auth token should be treated like a password—rotated frequently and stored in an environment file. OpenClaw on Lightsail is available across AWS commercial Regions, and detailed regional availability and future roadmap can be found on AWS's Region-specific Capabilities page.