OpenClaw Creator Peter Steinberger Joins OpenAI to Drive Next Generation of Personal Agents

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI

Peter Steinberger, who created the AI personal assistant now known as OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI. Previously known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, OpenClaw achieved viral popularity over the past few weeks with its promise to be the "AI that actually does things," whether that's managing your calendar, booking flights, or even joining a social network full of other AI assistants. (The name changed the first time after Anthropic threatened legal action over its similarity to Claude, then changed again because Steinberger liked the new name better.) In a blog post announcing his decision to join OpenAI, the Austrian developer said that while he might have been able to turn OpenClaw into a huge company, "It's not really exciting for me." "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," Steinberger said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that Steinberger will "drive the next generation of personal agents." As for OpenClaw, Altman said it will "live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support"

OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI

Sam Altman announced on X that Peter Steinberger, the man behind the trendy AI agent OpenClaw, was joining OpenAI. He said that Steinberger has "a lot of amazing ideas" about getting AI agents to interact with each other, saying "the future is going to be extremely multi-agent." He also said that this ability for agents to work together will "quickly become core to our product offerings." OpenClaw, previously known as Moltbot and Clawdbot, exploded on the scene earlier this year and became the darling of the tech world. Its rise was swift, but not without its bumps along the way. Earlier this month, researchers found over 400 malicious skills uploaded to ClawHub. It also launched MoltBook, a social network where AI agents went to complain about their humans, debate the provability of consciousness, and discuss the need for a private place to exchange ideas. And then it was immediately infiltrated by humans.

OpenAI Hires OpenClaw AI Agent Developer Peter Steinberg

Peter Steinberger, creator of popular open-source artificial intelligence program OpenClaw, will be joining OpenAI Inc. to help bolster the ChatGPT developer's product offerings. "OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support," OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman wrote in a post on X Sunday, adding that Steinberger is "joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents." Steinberger wrote in a separate post on his website Saturday that he will be joining OpenAI to be "part of the frontier of AI research and development, and continue building." "It's always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish," Steinberger wrote. "Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach." OpenClaw, previously called Clawdbot and Moltbot, has garnered a cult following since launching in November for its ability to operate autonomously, clearing users' inboxes, making restaurant reservations and checking in for flights, among other tasks. Users can also connect the tool to messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Slack and direct the agent through those platforms. "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use," Steinberger wrote. "That'll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research." This move comes amid growing security concerns around OpenClaw after a user reported the agent "went rogue" and spammed hundreds of messages after being given access to iMessage. Cybersecurity experts warn the tool is risky because it has access to private data, can communicate externally and is exposed to untrusted content -- which one researcher called the AI "lethal trifecta."

OpenAI grabs OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger

Whatever comes next will be 'core to OpenAI product offerings' 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. ®

OpenClaw founder Steinberger joins OpenAI, open-source bot becomes foundation

Feb 15 (Reuters) - Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI, and the open-source bot is becoming a foundation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Sunday. "Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents," Altman said in a post on X, adding "OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support." OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot or Moltbot, is what fans describe as an assistant that can stay on top of emails, deal with insurers, check in for flights and perform myriad other tasks. OpenClaw has had a viral rise since it was first introduced in November, receiving more than 100,000 stars on code repository GitHub and drawing 2 million visitors in a single week, according to a blog post by Steinberger. OpenClaw's growing popularity has attracted scrutiny, with China's industry ministry warning the open-source AI agent could pose significant security risks when improperly configured and expose users to cyberattacks and data breaches. "It's always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish. Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach," Steinberger posted in a blog on Sunday. Reporting by Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Chris Reese Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI, Altman Says

Illustration of OpenClaw logo on smartphone screen Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Sunday that the creator of the viral AI agent OpenClaw is joining the company, and that the service will "live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support." Previously called Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw was launched last month by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger. It's surged in popularity, due in part to attention on social media, as consumers and businesses swarm to products that can autonomously complete tasks, make decisions, and take actions on behalf of users without constant human guidance. In a post on X, Altman wrote that Steinberger is "joining OpenAI to 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," Altman wrote. "We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings." No terms were disclosed, but AI companies, including OpenAI, have been throwing open their wallets to hire top AI talent. In May, OpenAI acquired iPhone designer Jony Ive's AI devices startup io for over $6 billion. Meta and Google have also been spending billions to bring in AI developers and researchers. OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $500 billion and is now looking to boost that number, faces intense competition in the generative AI market, particularly from Google and Anthropic, whose AI models are being used by enterprises to take over more business tasks. Anthropic's Claude has been getting particular traction of late thanks to Claude Code, and the company recently introduced Claude Opus 4.6, which is better at coding, sustaining tasks for longer and creating higher-quality professional work, the company said. Anthropic was valued at $380 billion in a fundraising round that closed earlier in the week. OpenClaw has spread quickly in China and can be paired with Chinese-developed language models, such as DeepSeek, and configured to work with Chinese messaging apps through customized setups. Chinese search engine Baidu plans to give users of its main smartphone app direct access to OpenClaw, a spokesperson told CNBC. Some researchers are concerned about the openness of OpenClaw, and the cyberthreats potentially posed by users' ability to tweak it in just about anyway they see fit.

OpenAI hires OpenClaw AI agent developer Peter Steinberg | Fortune

Peter Steinberger, creator of popular open-source artificial intelligence program OpenClaw, will be joining OpenAI Inc. to help bolster the ChatGPT developer's product offerings. "OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support," OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman wrote in a post on X Sunday, adding that Steinberger is "joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents." Steinberger wrote in a separate post on his website Saturday that he will be joining OpenAI to be "part of the frontier of AI research and development, and continue building." "It's always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish," Steinberger wrote. "Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach." OpenClaw, previously called Clawdbot and Moltbot, has garnered a cult following since launching in November for its ability to operate autonomously, clearing users' inboxes, making restaurant reservations and checking in for flights, among other tasks. Users can also connect the tool to messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Slack and direct the agent through those platforms. "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use," Steinberger wrote. "That'll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research." This move comes amid growing security concerns around OpenClaw after a user reported the agent "went rogue" and spammed hundreds of messages after being given access to iMessage. Cybersecurity experts warn the tool is risky because it has access to private data, can communicate externally and is exposed to untrusted content -- which one researcher called the AI "lethal trifecta."

OpenAI hires OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger in push toward autonomous agents - SiliconANGLE

OpenAI hires OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger in push toward autonomous agents Peter Steinberger, the creator of the fast-growing open-source agent framework OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI Group PBC after weeks of being courted by multiple major artificial intelligence players, marking a notable coup for the company as the battle over agentic AI intensifies. OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, is an agentic artificial intelligence framework designed to run continuously and act on behalf of users. The software allows AI agents to execute commands, interact with external services, integrate with messaging platforms and operate with broad system-level permissions. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman announced the hire on Sunday on X Inc., saying Steinberger would help drive "the next generation of personal agents." Altman described Steinberger as a genius with significant ideas about the future of highly capable agents interacting with one another to complete useful tasks for people. Notably for OpenClaw fans, Altman added that OpenClaw will continue as an open-source project under a foundation structure, with OpenAI supporting its development. "The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that," Altman said. The move follows a remarkable few months for OpenClaw, with what began as an ambitious open-source personal agent project rapidly evolving into one of the most talked-about frameworks in AI. OpenClaw has attracted tens of thousands of developers and surged in GitHub stars as interest in multi-agent systems hsa exploded. The project tapped into a growing desire among enterprises and independent builders for AI agents that can reason across steps, call external services and operate semi-independently rather than simply generate text, or, put more simply, AI agents that can actually do things. OpenClaw's rise has also coincided with a broader shift in AI from static prompt-response systems to agentic architectures, systems where models are embedded inside loops that enable planning, tool use, memory retrieval and task execution. Differing from the chat-based prompting followed by answers model many are familiar with when it comes to generative AI, agentic AI, on the other hand, can break a goal into sub-tasks, search the web, write and run code, interact with application programming interfaces and coordinate with other agents. The concept of agentic AI has become a focal point for both startups and major labs, which see agents as a path toward more durable enterprise value and deeper integration into daily workflows. But while billions have flown into companies pursuing agentic AI, Steinberger came up the middle with a personally coded solution that didn't require venture capital largesse to deliver and even better still, from a user perspective, is offered as open source. For OpenAI, bringing Steinberger on board signals an acceleration of its own agent ambitions. OpenAI gains not only technical expertise by hiring the creator of one of the most visible open-source agent frameworks but also credibility within a developer community that has increasingly rallied around open, modular approaches to AI orchestration. His move to OpenAI may raise some concerns about how much attention OpenClaw may get from him in the future, but the commitment from Altman to keep OpenClaw alive as an open-source project that will be supported by OpenAI goes a long way in allaying any fears. With agentic AI becoming the battleground for the next generation of intelligent software, the balance between proprietary closed platforms and open ecosystems may arguably shape how broadly these systems are adopted. Steinberger's move to OpenAI marks a significant moment in that transition.