openclaw-memgpt-sidecar

A maintained fork of MemGPT that packages the MemGPT memory architecture as a Python sidecar for the openclaw-memgpt plugin.

It preserves MemGPT's memory design — the core / archival / recall memory tiers, the function-calling syscall vocabulary, and the recursive summariser — while modernising the surrounding plumbing so the architecture runs on the current Python LLM ecosystem and against Anthropic/Claude models through OpenAI-compatible proxies.

Relationship to upstream MemGPT

This project is a fork of MemGPT (originally cpacker/MemGPT, now maintained as letta-ai/letta), described in Packer et al., 2024. Originally authored by Packer et al. (2024); maintained as a fork by Altay Acar. All credit for the memory architecture belongs to the original authors:

• Charles Packer
• Vivian Fang
• Sarah Wooders
• Shishir Patil
• Kevin Lin
• Ion Stoica
• Joseph E. Gonzalez

The fork exists because the original pymemgpt release was written against the 2023 single-vendor OpenAI ecosystem (the pre-v1 functions API, openai SDK v0.28, llama_index 0.8). Running that architecture unchanged against today's SDKs and against non-OpenAI providers (e.g. Claude via LiteLLM) is not possible without compatibility work. This fork supplies exactly that work and nothing more: the memory architecture is preserved; only the plumbing is modernised.

Scope of modifications

The changes are deliberately narrow and limited to compatibility and dependency plumbing:

• Wire-format modernisation (Anthropic/Claude compatibility) — translation at the SDK boundary from MemGPT's pre-v1 OpenAI functions vocabulary to the modern OpenAI tools API, so payloads reach Claude (and other providers behind OpenAI-compatible proxies) as valid tool-use exchanges.
• Dependency modernisation — openai SDK v0.28 → v2.x port, llama_index 0.8 → 0.14 migration, and accompanying dependency-pin loosening.
• Adapter-layer ports — small, behaviour-preserving ports and reuse-oriented refactors that let the existing code run on the modern dependencies without altering the memory architecture.

A full, file-level account of what changed relative to upstream is in CHANGES.md, per the Apache 2.0 modification-notice requirement.

Use

This package is primarily intended as the sidecar dependency of the openclaw-memgpt plugin. Independent use is possible, but API stability is scoped to the plugin's needs and is not guaranteed for other consumers.

Installation

pip install openclaw-memgpt-sidecar==1.0.0

Python 3.11 is required.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full text. The license is preserved unchanged from upstream MemGPT.