OpenAI hires founder of OpenClaw agent framework
Peter Steinberger, founder of the open-source agent framework OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI. The move signals OpenAI's increased focus on agentic AI capabilities. Steinberger confirmed that the OpenClaw project will remain open-source.
- Before founding OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger was the founder and CEO of PSPDFKit, a successful bootstrapped company that developed a PDF framework for mobile and web applications and was acquired by Insight Partners. - OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, is a model-agnostic framework, allowing it to connect with LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and local models. It operates as a self-hosted gateway on a user's machine, interacting with local files and applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. - The OpenClaw project gained significant traction in the open-source community, accumulating nearly 200,000 GitHub stars shortly after its launch in late 2025. By February 2026, users had created 1.5 million AI agents using the platform. - OpenAI is establishing a foundation to maintain OpenClaw as an open-source project, which it will continue to support financially. Steinberger's stated goal is to "build an agent that even my mum can use" and he chose OpenAI to accelerate this vision rather than building another company. - The hire is part of a larger industry trend moving from conversational chatbots to active AI agents that can perform tasks and automate workflows. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that he expects agentic AI to "quickly become core to our product offerings." - OpenAI has been developing its own tools for agentic AI, including an Agents SDK and a platform called 'AgentKit' for building and deploying agents, indicating a strategic focus on this area. - The competitive landscape for AI agent frameworks includes a variety of open-source and proprietary tools such as LangChain, AutoGen from Microsoft, LlamaIndex, and CrewAI, each with different approaches to orchestration and development.
