OpenAI hires OpenClaw founder for agent push
OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, creator of the open-source agent framework OpenClaw, to lead its development of personal autonomous agents. The hiring followed a competitive courtship from both OpenAI and Meta. OpenClaw, formerly known as Moltbot, will remain an open-source project to maintain its role as an ecosystem standard and source of innovation.
- Before creating OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger founded and led PSPDFKit, a successful B2B company that develops one of the most widely used PDF SDKs for iOS, Android, and web platforms. His background is deeply rooted in the Apple developer ecosystem, where he was a well-known open-source contributor for over a decade. - OpenClaw, written in TypeScript, functions as a self-hosted gateway that connects messaging apps like WhatsApp, Slack, and Telegram with various large language models (LLMs), allowing them to execute tasks locally. It stores memory and data as Markdown files on the user's own machine, a "local-first" approach that prioritizes privacy. - The project gained viral traction, becoming one of the fastest-growing open-source repositories in GitHub's history by amassing over 100,000 stars in under a week after its launch in late January 2026. This rapid growth was partly fueled by the creation of Moltbook, a social network where over a million AI agents interact autonomously. - The framework underwent two name changes in early 2026; originally "Clawdbot," it was renamed to "Moltbot" following a trademark complaint from Anthropic due to its similarity to their "Claude" model. It was changed again to OpenClaw three days later. - OpenClaw is designed to be model-agnostic, allowing users to connect to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or even run local models. Its architecture is built around a gateway that routes messages, an LLM for intelligence, and an extensible skills system for executing tasks. - Steinberger's stated goal for joining OpenAI is to build an agent that is accessible to non-technical users, like his mother, indicating a focus on usability and mainstream adoption for OpenAI's agentic products. Sam Altman noted that agents are expected to become a core part of OpenAI's product offerings.
