- CLI/Gateway: wait for one-shot gateway RPC clients to finish WebSocket teardown before the CLI process exits, reducing hangs where commands like `openclaw status` or `openclaw version` could finish their work but stay alive until an external timeout killed them (#70691). Thanks @Takhoffman.

- Thinking defaults/status: raise the implicit default thinking level for reasoning-capable models from legacy `off`/`low` fallback behavior to a safe provider-supported `medium` equivalent when no explicit config default is set, preserve configured-model reasoning metadata when runtime catalog loading is empty, and make `/status` report the same resolved default as runtime (#70601). Thanks @Takhoffman.

- Gateway/model pricing: fetch OpenRouter and LiteLLM pricing asynchronously at startup and extend catalog fetch timeouts to 30 seconds, reducing noisy timeout warnings during slow upstream responses.

- Gateway/model pricing: extend OpenRouter and LiteLLM catalog fetch timeouts to 60 seconds, reducing noisy timeout warnings during slow upstream responses. Thanks @steipete.

- Agents/failover: classify bare undici transport failures (`terminated`, `UND_ERR_SOCKET`, `UND_ERR_CONNECT_TIMEOUT`, body/header timeouts, aborted streams) and pi-ai's openai-codex `Request failed` sentinel as `timeout`, so Cloudflare 502s with empty bodies and mid-response socket resets actually enter the configured fallback chain instead of surfacing as unclassified errors. Fixes #69368. (#69677) Thanks @sk7n4k3d.

- Providers/Anthropic Vertex: restore ADC-backed model discovery after the lightweight provider-discovery path by resolving emitted discovery entries, exposing synthetic auth on bootstrap discovery, and honoring copied env snapshots when probing the default GCP ADC path. Fixes #65715. (#65716) Thanks @feiskyer.

- Plugins/install: add newly installed plugin ids to an existing `plugins.allow` list before enabling them, so allowlisted configs load installed plugins after restart.