There's a lot of useful autonomous things that don't require unrestricted outbound communication, but agreed that the "safe" claw configuration probably falls quite a bit short of the popular perception of a full AI assistant at this point.

Huh? The bot can communicate with me freely as it sees fit. A "conversation" in telegram parlance is not time-limited, it's ongoing once established, so no it's not only inbound. It can awaken and ping me whenever it wants. This can also work if it's added to a group chat.

If you mean it's not outbound as in it can't message arbitrary random users out of nowhere, well yeah, and that's a very desirable trait.