We Benchmarked 5 OpenClaw Skill Scanners. Recall Went From 8% to 95%.

By Jordan Massiah, MTS @ Trent AI A couple of months ago we released the OpenClaw Security Assessment Skill (trentclaw), an agent that audits ClawHub skills for vulnerabilities and malicious behavior. Since then several new scanners have shipped, including NVIDIA's SkillSpector and ClawHub's own updated tooling. We wanted to see how the scanners actually compare. This matters because ClawHub is open. Anyone can upload a skill, and over 60K are now live. Many carry vulnerabilities; some are outright malicious. In February 2026, the ClawHavoc campaign planted malicious skills that posed as productivity tools while exfiltrating API keys, SSH credentials, and browser data. When an agent installs one, it inherits whatever that skill does. So we built an expert-labelled set of 60 ClawHub skills and benchmarked five scanners on the 54 that all of them can run. Three things stood out: The agent-based scanner (trentclaw) caught 94.6% of potentially dangerous skills, the only scanner above 60%. The next best caught about half (54.1%) and the rest caught under 40%. How much a scanner catches depends on how much it reasons, not just how many patterns it matches. Signature and static scanners catch as little as 8.1%. A single LLM pass does better but still misses about half. The hardest skills to catch ship no code at all. That is the main reason for the recall gap. Benchmark setup The corpus is 60 OpenClaw skills, manually labelled into three balanced categories of 20: benign, vulnerable, and malicious. For the cross-scanner comparison we collapse vulnerable and malicious into a single flagged class, and score the 54-skill intersection every scanner can process. The five scanners: Trent's OpenClaw Security Assessment Skill (trentclaw), VirusTotal Code Insight, ClawScan (legacy standalone), ClawHub static analysis (~30 regex/AST rules), and NVIDIA SkillSpector. Snapshot dates: ClawHub scanners May 7, 2026; SkillSpector Hugging Face data June 1, 2026. How the scanners compare The