I Deployed OpenClaw on AWS and Here's What I Found as a Cloud Security Engineer

Part 1 of a series: Secure setup, real findings, and attack surface analysis of an autonomous AI agent on AWS Lightsail. AWS just announced the general availability of OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail — an open-source, self-hosted autonomous AI agent that connects to WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and executes tasks independently: running code, managing files, browsing the web. The community is fired up testing it. So did I — but with a Cloud Security Engineer hat on. This post isn't about how to use OpenClaw as an assistant. It's about what I found while setting it up from a security perspective , what decisions I made, and why. What exactly is OpenClaw? Before talking security, let's align on concepts. An LLM (like Claude or GPT) receives a prompt and returns text. That's it. An autonomous agent is different: it has access to tools (terminal, browser, APIs), decides the order in which to use them, interprets the results, and acts — without you directing each step. The LLM is the "brain," b