OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI, Altman Says
Illustration of OpenClaw logo on smartphone screen
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Sunday that the creator of the viral AI agent OpenClaw will join the company and that the service “will live on on a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support.”
OpenClaw, previously called Clawdbot and Moltbot, was launched last month by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger. It has grown in popularity in part due to attention on social media, as consumers and businesses flock to products that can autonomously complete tasks, make decisions, and perform actions on users’ behalf, without constant human guidance.
One Publish on XSteinberger “joins OpenAI to lead the next generation of personal agents,” Altman wrote.
“He is a genius with many amazing ideas about the future of very intelligent agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for humans,” Altman wrote. “We expect this to quickly become a staple of our product offerings.”
No terms have been announced, but AI companies, including OpenAI, are opening their wallets to hire top AI talent. In May, OpenAI acquired iPhone designer Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for more than $6 billion. Meta And Google they also spend billions of dollars to hire AI developers and researchers.
OpenAI, which was last valued at $500 billion and now aims to increase that figure, faces intense competition in the generative AI market, particularly from Google and Anthropic, whose AI models are being used by businesses to take on more commercial tasks.
Anthropic’s Claude has been getting special attention lately thanks to Claude Code, and the company recently released Claude Opus 4.6, which is better at coding, can make tasks last longer, and creates higher quality professional work.
Anthropic’s value was determined at $380 billion in the fundraising round completed at the beginning of the week.
OpenClaw has spread rapidly in China and can be paired with Chinese-developed language models such as DeepSeek and configured to work with Chinese messaging applications through customized setups. Chinese search engine Baidu plans to provide direct access to OpenClaw to users of its main smartphone app, a spokesperson told CNBC.
Some researchers are anxious It’s about the cyber threats potentially posed by OpenClaw’s openness and users’ ability to tweak it as they see fit.
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