OpenClaw 2026.9.2 turns Swarm on by default and makes sessions visible to other agents

OpenClaw published release 2026.9.2 on September 5, 2026. Most of the notes are fixes, but two entries describe defaults, and a default is the part of a release that reaches the people who read no notes at all. Concurrent sub-agents now run without being asked for, and one agent's session tools now reach the sessions of other agents on the same Gateway. Both remain configurable, and both behave differently after an ordinary update.

Two defaults that change during the upgrade

Swarm orchestrates concurrent sub-agents with structured results and live progress, and in this release it is enabled by default. Explicit opt-outs still apply, tool restrictions still apply, and Code Mode keeps its separate opt-in. The change is therefore about what happens when nobody has decided anything.

The second default is narrower and matters more on a Gateway that hosts several agents. Session tools now default to all-session visibility, and ordinary agent-to-agent access is enabled. Setting tools.sessions.visibility to agent or self narrows that access again, while existing tool and sandbox restrictions are unchanged.

• Swarm runs until an explicit opt-out is written into the configuration.
• tools.sessions.visibility accepts agent or self when one agent should not read another agent's sessions.

GPT-6 Astra joins the model list

The release adds openai/gpt-6-astra as a model you can select with an OpenAI API-key profile or an eligible ChatGPT or Codex account. Text and image input work, tool calls go through the Responses endpoint, and the supported reasoning controls are available. On a subscription account, availability follows successful account discovery rather than the release itself.

On OpenAI Platform API-key routes that use the built-in OpenClaw runtime and the official Responses endpoint, direct function tools can run asynchronously and a response already in flight can be steered over a cached WebSocket. A /think ultra orchestration is added for the OpenClaw and native Codex runtimes.

Most settings no longer wait for a restart

Agent, model, tool, channel, browser, node, access and terminal settings are now applied by the running components that own them, instead of waiting for the Gateway to come back. The settings that still require a restart stay marked as such in the configuration reference, and that marking is what separates a change that takes effect now from one that waits.

What plugin authors have to change, and by when

A plugin icon is now packaged at assets/icon.png instead of being named by a URL in the manifest. OpenClaw loads the packaged image without a network request, and an icon that is missing or invalid no longer prevents the plugin from loading.

The dated item is the deprecation. The prompt-context aliases carrying the untrusted names become eligible for removal from the plugin SDK on or after September 8, 2026, and the migration goes to the channel-named context fields and to buildChannelMetadata.

• Package the icon at assets/icon.png and drop the URL from the manifest.
• Move off the untrusted-named prompt-context aliases before September 8, 2026.