Peter Steinberger, the creator of the tantalizing-but-risky personal AI agent OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI.
In a Sunday Xeet, OpenAI boss Sam Altman said Steinberger will “drive the next generation of personal agents.”
“He is 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. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings,” Altman added.
Steinberger used his blog to explain his decision.
“I could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company,” he wrote, but said “it’s not really exciting for me.”
“I’m a builder at heart. I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. 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.”
Altman said OpenClaw “will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support.”
“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” he said.
That stance seems to have been very important to Steinberger, who wrote that he spent last week in San Francisco “talking with the major labs” before deciding to join OpenAI.
“It’s always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish,” he wrote. “Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach. The more I talked with the people there, the clearer it became that we both share the same vision.”
Thus ends an extraordinary few weeks for OpenClaw, which just a few weeks ago was an obscure project named “Clawdbot” that allows users to drive third-party online services through messaging apps – if they’re brave enough to provide Clawdbot with their credentials.
The bot can automate tasks such as replying to emails and is tied up with an app store of sorts that allows developers to define other automations that link to myriad services.
As Clawdbot gained popularity, it struck two problems.
One was objections to its name from AI outfit Anthropic, which makes models called “Claude” and felt Clawdbot’s name was more than a friendly homage. The bot quickly changed name to MoltBot before settling on “OpenClaw.”
The other problem was shabby security that saw analyst firm Gartner rate the code an “unacceptable cybersecurity risk” that businesses should immediately ban and block – or at least isolate in throwaway virtual environments.
OpenAI looks like it will do away with the “OpenClaw” moniker for its own services and gets to throw people and money at the agentic service.
Neither party has said how much money, or other consideration, has changed hands to make this happen. Nor did Altman offer any hint of when or how OpenAI will turn Clawdbot into a service.
History suggests the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will soon announce clones/competitors for OpenClaw – and that Apple will come in for criticism for not doing likewise with sufficient speed – because the AI industry has largely concluded that users may be more likely to pay for agents that can undertake actions on their behalf, instead of just spewing words. ®