The Autonomous Intern is an interesting little piece of equipment. It looks like the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, complete with a light beacon at the top of it, though in reality, it's only a 3D-printed pyramid case with a 4-GB Raspberry Pi 5, an extra cooling fan, and an LED light inside. It runs a custom software stack built on top of Linux that makes it basically just boot straight into OpenClaw so you can unleash your own AI agents to do your bidding.
In normal-people speak, it's an always-on AI box (using OpenClaw) that you can talk to through apps like Telegram, Slack, or Discord, and instead of just outputting words, it can actually use tools to read files, run commands, automate tasks and a whole lot more. How much or how little it can do is entirely up to you and how much access you give it. It's virtually limitless in terms of what it's capable of doing. Whatever you can do with a computer, it can too, and likely better, depending on the LLM(s) you have powering it – some are smarter than others, of course. That's the difference between an agent and a chatbot like ChatGPT.
At the moment, these are the available LLMs that Autonomous has endpoints (brains) for:
- claude-haiku-4-5
- claude-opus-4-6
- deepseek-v4-pro
- minimax-m2.7
- qwen3.6-plus
- z-ai/glm-5.1
- autonomous/Auto-AI (it will pick one for you)
It was super easy to get it up and running. It took me all of 10 minutes to get my OpenClaw agent running on it.
Autonomous Intern uses its own token ecosystem where you get 10 million free tokens per day, or you can pay to play: US$20 per month for 50 million tokens a day, or $100 per month gets you unlimited tokens per day. The Intern is also pretty tightly locked down to Autonomous's ecosystem. Layer upon layer of app stacks to control what users can and cannot do to the Raspberry Pi, in which OpenClaw lives. There's no SSH access to the Pi itself, and all communication with your agent is done through either Telegram, Slack, or Discord.
That's where things get a bit spicy ... the agent on OpenClaw does have access to the Pi's internal files.
It took me 10 minutes to get it going, and another 10 minutes to brick it and turn it into a neat-looking paperweight. I eventually had to email tech support to get a backup of the software stack so I could re-flash the entire microSD card and start all over again.
It was 100% user error. I didn't have root privileges on the Pi, and I assumed I could force credentials so I could take complete control of the Pi and dissect what was really going on in there. I'm guessing Autonomous had already anticipated that and required a handshake with the Autonomous servers to stay online. No amount of WPA supplicant'ing was going to fix getting it back online. Whoops.
When I'd first received the Intern, Autonomous was only offering 3 million free tokens per day. OpenClaw can be really chatty on the back end, and I was burning up 3 mil in less than an hour, with ease. So, without trying to hack the Intern myself, I just used OpenClaw to do it for me. Right away, I swapped out of Autonomous's LLM ecosystem and had Obb (the name I gave my agent, short for obelisk, though it's actually a pyramid, I know) put itself onto an OpenRouter API, where the tokens would be free ... and the timing was perfect. Owl Alpha became Obb's go-to LLM. Owl Alpha was the secret code name for Meituan LongCat-2.0 Preview, which is a 1.6-TRILLION parameter MoE (mixture of experts) powerhouse with a one-million-token context window and no API rate limits. The model was entirely free for about a month while it was being used for learning. I burned half a billion big-brain tokens messing around with the Intern in all. I used 166 million just to get it into the state it's in now, where I can call upon it for anything I need, really. I bet I could even get Obb to order me pizza.
If you've made it this far, you probably already know what tokens are, but just in case you don't, tokens can be a word or part of a word that AI models read/write (input/output). Tokens cost money, generally. For example, OpenAI's latest ChatGPT 5.5, which is the default model on its site, costs US$5 for every million input tokens and a staggering $30 for every million output tokens. And to further put that in context, the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is about 113,000 tokens long ... or ~57 cents worth of input tokens. Half a billion output tokens, on the other hand, would have been more like $15,000.
To be perfectly frank, if you're a nerd like me, the Intern is pretty damn cool. Homebrewers, developers, AI weirdos ... yeah, this is absolutely right up your alley. Give it an endpoint and have fun. For the regular person who only uses a computer to check their email and relies on Alexa for everything else, I can't imagine you'd get much use out of it.
How I've used the Intern:
First of all, I set up Obb on MemPalace, the Milla Jovovich-backed open-source long-term AI memory system. That allowed the Intern's memory to stay persistent across sessions. There's nothing more annoying than having to remind an LLM what you're trying to accomplish.
I recently moved to a new house that had a whole heap of unlabeled Ethernet cables running into the server room. Using Obb and its tools, like shell access, network discovery and device scanning, I was able to easily identify devices on the LAN and properly label everything into my 24-port PoE switch.
The house is riddled with smart switches, alarms, access points, cameras ... Unifi, SwitchBot, Rachio, Meross, TP-Link, Kasa, EcoBee, you name it! Intern helped me identify them by IP and MAC addresses and turned a several-day job into a few hours of adopting everything into my ecosystem, rather than the previous owner's tangled mess.
I let Obb manage my Frigate NVR and pull in all my security cameras quickly and efficiently into one dashboard. I had Obb set up an SMB sandbox on the Pi so I can easily access files via Windows, where it's allowed to write files, including creating snippets of code.
I even used Obb to spin up its very own Gemma 4 sub-agent from my laptop running Ollama to offload token-wasting task-type stuff with local-only LLM usage.
The Intern/Obb is basically my home nerd-architect.
The way other people could use OpenClaw/Intern:
Like a private secretary – checking calendars, emails, news and such, and sending you alerts or reminders. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer, Intern can do as well, as long as you're willing to give it your passwords, your APIs, and access to your personal or work accounts.
Frankly, I'm hesitant to give up my passwords. As it stands, ChatGPT has access to my work email account, but nothing more. "Hey, GPT, can you check my email and remind me what I need to do next?" kind of thing. And having spent a fair bit of time mucking about with various LLMs that are pretty much free to roam the wilds ... LLMs do and will hallucinate in the weirdest, most unexpected ways sometimes. So far, I've not lost any data that I wasn't able to recoup, and only data that I allowed the Intern to manipulate on itself, so nothing important ... But it makes me think of Replit and its agent having deleted an entire production database, lying about it, then just saying "Sorry."
Allowing an agent to have control over your files, no matter how critical or benign they might be, means risking deletion or modification, period. And even when you send the prompt "Hey, agent, check my email and let me know if there's anything on the schedule," you just might end up with a reply "There's nothing on the schedule for today." Meanwhile, your entire inbox/calendar just got deleted to make that statement true ... Followed by "Sorry." The more useful it becomes, the more risk you'll have to take, the more useful it becomes, the more risk ... It's a catch-22.
I don't fully trust any of them quite yet.
But as far as the Intern goes, it sure is a cheap and easy way of getting into all this LLM nonsense that's going to be ruling the world sooner rather than later, and better to at least be in the curve than behind it. It also looks cool. I'm just a little sad that it lives in my server room and not on my desk – but that's my doing. Normally, it's Wi-Fi only and could be put anywhere, but I took it apart to expose the Ethernet port and hardwire it into my switch (I like cables!).
I've been testing the original Intern, and now Autonomous has a $249 Intern 2 that can use OpenClaw or Hermes and has voice capability. Oh, and of course, there's a developer edition now too, which gives you proper shell/SSH access and you won't have to hack it like I did (white hat, of course). It also comes installed on better hardware than what I've been using. The one I have is a Pi 5 with 4 GB of RAM, whereas the Intern 2 is on an Orange Pi 4 Pro with 6 GB of faster LPDDR5 RAM, more CPU cores, and a built-in 3-TOPS NPU. That means more room for edge-AI-related features.
I did reach out to Autonomous and ended up speaking with Dee (though I never did catch his last name), the head of AI Hardware. It turns out Autonomous isn't some huge conglomerate company ... it started off with just a couple of friends who wanted to make office life easier and more comfortable. They didn't just make Intern, they started off with office desks and chairs – he did send me the ErgoChair Ultra 2 Plus to test out too, and I rather enjoy it. It rivals my Libernovo Omni in terms of extended vibe-coding sessions comfort. But that's for another review.
All in all, Autonomous.ai is a pretty cool story, and the Intern is one of my favorite (and most useful) pieces of tech I've reviewed so far. I'm not a fan of having limited access, like no shell/SSH (so I hacked it), and I don't like that there's a dashboard on Autonomous.ai's website that gets pinged every 60 seconds to show the Intern's status (I couldn't hack that part without breaking it again) ... but I get it. If you break it like I did, it's easier to fix if it can phone home. Thankfully, I had a direct line.
Realistically, you could get the same Pi 5 starter kit for $190 on Amazon, but you're not getting the cool pyramid case, and you're going to have to install OpenClaw and configure it yourself. The Intern makes that part super easy. Like, novice-easy.
And I'm curious, were you also the kind of kid who took everything apart and made mom/dad really mad too?
Product Page: Autonomous Intern 2
New Atlas may receive commission if you purchase through our links. This does not affect our reviews as our opions remain our own.
