I can not spawn subagents

[summer prairie]

openclaw --version
OpenClaw 2026.4.15 (041266a)
My main agent try launch subagents and see forbidden: agentId is not allowed for sessions_spawn (allowed: none).

[bronze crow]

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[little pagoda]

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Approve it from the Web UI or terminal UI for now. Discord supports native exec approvals for this account. Configure channels.discord.execApprovals.approvers or commands.ownerAllowFrom; leave channels.discord.execApprovals.enabled unset/auto or set it to true.

[little pagoda]

That error usually means one of these:

1. You’re targeting another agent with agentId, but that target is not allowed
2. The session is stale and still has the old permission snapshot

For sessions_spawn, the config that matters is subagent allowlist, not tools.agentToAgent.allow.

Use one of these in openclaw.json:

{
  agents: {
    defaults: {
      subagents: {
        allowAgents: ["*"], // or ["worker", "researcher"]
      },

    },
    list: [
      {
        id: "main",
        subagents: {
          allowAgents: ["worker", "researcher"],
        },
      },
    ],
  },
}

A couple important gotchas:

• If you only want a background worker under the same agent, omit agentId entirely.

• After changing allowAgents, restart the gateway and start a brand new session/thread. Older sessions can keep stale permissions and still show allowed: none.

Quick check:

• Have the agent call agents_list
• If the target agent does not appear there, sessions_spawn will keep failing

Docs:

• https://docs.openclaw.ai/tools/subagents
• https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/configuration-reference

If you want, paste your agents section here and I’ll sanity-check the exact JSON5.