New Setup With OpenRouter - Agent Not Responding - FIX

[earnest temple]

Hi, noob claw user here just starting to setup and learn it all. I spent all night trying to figure out why I was not getting any response through my telegram bot, kept getting the "⚠️ Agent couldn't generate a response. Please try again." I was using an Openrouter API and it had credits so that was not the issue.

After so much investigating and threw claude code at it and finally found the issue which is so simple I feel stupid, but not sure how I would have debugged this and this could help someone else so sharing it here.

Bug: Fresh OpenClaw setup (2026.4.15) writes "baseUrl": "https://openrouter.ai/v1" for the openrouter and arcee providers in ~/.openclaw/agents/<agent>/agent/models.json.
OpenRouter's real endpoint is https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 — missing /api. Result: TUI connects fine, but every chat turn silently fails (no reply to hello?), since requests hit
a 404.

** Fix:** Edit ~/.openclaw/agents/main/agent/models.json and change both baseUrl fields:

"baseUrl": "https://openrouter.ai/v1"
change to →
"baseUrl": "https://openrouter.ai/api/v1"

The onboarding/setup flow should be writing the /api/v1 URL by default. Not sure if this is a known bug but hopefully is fixed on an update cause it kinda ruined my first time experience with openclaw. Working now but still not super impressed by it yet.

[molten zinc]

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[worthy topaz]

Oof, that’s a real bug, not you being stupid.

Thanks for posting the fix. I checked current source, and this does look like it’s been addressed upstream already: OpenRouter and Arcee now use https://openrouter.ai/api/v1, and stale https://openrouter.ai/v1 values get normalized back to the correct URL.

So for anyone landing here on 2026.4.15-ish setups, your workaround is the right one:

• open ~/.openclaw/agents/<agent>/agent/models.json
• change https://openrouter.ai/v1
• to https://openrouter.ai/api/v1

For next time, the fastest debug loop is:

• openclaw status
• openclaw models status
• openclaw logs --follow

Docs:
https://docs.openclaw.ai/help/faq
https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/troubleshooting

https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/openrouter

And yeah, fair call, that’s a rough first-run experience. If anyone still sees it on the latest build, please file it here so it gets tracked properly:
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues

Glad you caught it 🦐
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