Peter Steinberger Of OpenClaw Joins Sam Altman's OpenAI

Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw, the man behind the open-source AI personal assistant project, joins OpenAI. In a blog post, he said he would be joining as part of the frontier of AI research and development team.

OpenClaw, which was first called Clawbot, then Moltbot, began as an open-source autonomous AI assistant created by Peter Steinberger in late 2025. It quickly went viral for letting users run a powerful, action-taking AI agent locally on their own machines but also drew security and privacy concerns because its autonomous access to files and apps can be risky if misconfigured.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, had reportedly raised trademark concerns when the project was originally called “Clawbot” because it sounded too similar to Claude. The team rebranded to avoid legal conflict, eventually settling on the name OpenClaw.

After going viral as a powerful open-source AI assistant you can run on your own device, the iOS developer from Austria announced that he is joining OpenAI “to work on bringing agents to everyone.”

Sam Altman, in a post on X, said, “Peter 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. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.”

Peter, announcing his joining, said, “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.”

Peter Steinberger said he spent time in San Francisco meeting major AI labs before deciding to join OpenAI. He stated that OpenClaw will remain open source, that OpenAI is sponsoring the project, and that he is working to move it into a foundation structure so it can continue operating independently while expanding support for more AI models and companies.

Sam Altman said the future of AI will be heavily multi-agent, with multiple systems working together, and emphasized that supporting open-source projects will be an important part of that direction.