OpenAI hires OpenClaw founder for agentic AI push
OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, founder of the personal AI assistant framework OpenClaw, to lead a new division focused on autonomous, action-taking assistant products. The move signals a strategic shift from conversational LLMs toward workflow-integrated agents. Steinberger stated he joined OpenAI after concluding his own startup could have become a "huge company" but that OpenAI was the best place to build practical AI agents.
- Before creating OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger founded and bootstrapped PSPDFKit, a B2B company that became a widely used PDF SDK on over a billion devices. He sold his shares in 2020 and took a three-year break from the tech industry. - OpenClaw originated as a personal project named Clawdbot, built to be a self-hosted agent that runs locally and interacts with users through messaging apps like Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp. It underwent two name changes due to a trademark complaint from Anthropic, first to Moltbot and then to OpenClaw. - The OpenClaw framework functions as a local gateway, allowing LLMs to securely read and write files, execute scripts, and control a browser in a sandboxed environment. It maintains persistent memory and user preferences by storing data as local Markdown files, which allows for deeper personalization. - The project's architecture is model-agnostic, enabling it to work with various LLMs from providers like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and local models via servers like Ollama or LM Studio. - OpenClaw experienced rapid viral growth, becoming one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in GitHub history with over 180,000 stars by early February 2026. - As part of the move to OpenAI, OpenClaw will be managed by an independent open-source foundation that OpenAI will continue to support, rather than being an outright acquisition.
