OpenClaw Creator Peter Steinberger Joins OpenAI, Project Moves to Open-Source Foundation

Peter Steinberger, the Austrian engineer who built OpenClaw from a weekend project into one of the most popular open-source AI agents on the planet, is joining OpenAI. The announcement, made jointly by Steinberger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on February 14, marks one of the most significant talent acquisitions in the current AI agent arms race.

OpenClaw - the autonomous AI assistant that can browse the web, manage your calendar, book flights, and run shell commands on your local machine - will not be folded into OpenAI's proprietary stack. Instead, it will transition to an independent open-source foundation, with OpenAI as a sponsor.

From Weekend Hack to 200,000 GitHub Stars

Steinberger first published OpenClaw (then called Clawdbot) in November 2025 as a side project. The name did not last long - Anthropic threatened legal action over the similarity to "Claude," prompting a rename to Moltbot and eventually OpenClaw.

The project exploded in late January 2026, partly fueled by the viral popularity of Moltbook, the AI-agent social network. Within weeks, OpenClaw amassed over 200,000 stars and 35,000 forks on GitHub. Companies across Silicon Valley and China began adopting it.

What set OpenClaw apart from the growing field of AI agents was its philosophy: run locally, own your data, work with any model. It supports WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, and nearly a dozen other channels. It speaks and listens on macOS, iOS, and Android. And unlike cloud-dependent alternatives, it runs on your own machine.

"I'm a Builder, Not a Company Builder"

Steinberger is no stranger to building successful products. He spent 13 years building PSPDFKit, a cross-platform PDF toolkit used by major enterprises, before selling the company to Nutrient in 2024.

But when it came to OpenClaw, he was not interested in repeating the venture-backed company playbook. "I'm a builder at heart," Steinberger wrote in his announcement. "I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot."

He could see how OpenClaw might become a massive company, he said, but "it's not really exciting for me." Instead: "What I want is to change the world, not build a large company, and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone."

His stated goal at OpenAI is to build "an agent that even my mum can use" - prioritizing accessibility and safety for mainstream users.

Altman's Multi-Agent Bet

Sam Altman announced the hire on X, calling Steinberger a "genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people."

Altman framed the move as part of OpenAI's broader multi-agent strategy: "The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to support open source as part of that. OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support."

This is a notable statement from the CEO of a company that has been criticized for its own complicated relationship with open source. By sponsoring OpenClaw's foundation rather than absorbing it, OpenAI appears to be betting that an ecosystem of interoperable agents - some open, some proprietary - will be more valuable than a walled garden.

Europe's Loss

The subtext of Steinberger's departure is hard to miss. According to reporting by Trending Topics, no major European tech CEO made a serious effort to recruit him. Meanwhile, Altman called personally. Mark Zuckerberg reached out via WhatsApp. Satya Nadella also made contact.

The European tech press has framed this as a familiar story: continent produces talent, continent loses talent to American capital and speed. European regulations - GDPR, the AI Act, NIS2 - add compliance overhead that slows product launches. European venture capital cannot match the speed or scale of US dealmaking. As one commentator put it: "Europe is applauding itself. America is building."

What It Means for the Agent Race

The OpenClaw acquisition signals where the industry thinks the value is heading. The major labs are not just competing on model quality anymore - they are competing on agent infrastructure. Who builds the default personal agent that sits between users and the digital world? That is the trillion-dollar question.

OpenAI now has the creator of the most popular open-source agent on staff. Steinberger brings not just technical talent but a community of hundreds of thousands of developers who have built on, extended, and evangelized OpenClaw.

Whether the foundation model for OpenClaw can truly remain independent under OpenAI's sponsorship is an open question. Open-source foundations backed by a single corporate sponsor have a mixed track record. But for now, the code stays open, the community keeps building, and Steinberger gets access to OpenAI's frontier models and research.

The claw, as they say, is the law.

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