The hottest name in AI over the last couple of weeks had said that he was being courted by both Meta and OpenAI, and he now seems to have made a choice.
Peter Steinberger, creator of the viral AI assistant OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot and Clawdbot), is joining OpenAI to lead development of what the company is calling “the next generation of personal agents.” The announcement, made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, marks a significant acquisition of both talent and vision as the race to build practical agentic AI systems intensifies.
A “Genius” Hire
“Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents,” Altman wrote in the announcement. “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.”
The praise from Altman reflects the impact Steinberger’s work has had in demonstrating what’s possible with agentic AI. OpenClaw captured widespread attention as a self-hosted assistant that could autonomously manage email, calendars, and complex workflows across messaging platforms—going far beyond simple chatbot functionality to act as a genuine digital employee.
Steinberger’s hire comes after what he described as intensive discussions with both OpenAI and Meta, including personal conversations with both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg. In a recent interview, he had acknowledged strong ties to OpenAI, calling himself “the biggest Codex advertisement show that’s unpaid” and noting it would feel “gratifying to put a price on all the work I did for free.”
OpenClaw’s Open-source Future
Crucially, the acquisition doesn’t mean the end of OpenClaw as an independent project. “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support,” Altman stated. This arrangement appears designed to maintain the community and ecosystem that has grown rapidly around the platform while bringing Steinberger’s expertise in-house.
The decision to keep OpenClaw open source aligns with OpenAI’s broader strategic thinking about the future of AI agents. “The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” Altman explained.
This multi-agent vision—where multiple AI systems interact with each other to accomplish complex tasks—has been a core theme of Steinberger’s work. His recent experiments have explored scenarios where agents communicate, collaborate, and solve problems that would be difficult for any single system to handle alone.
What This Means for OpenAI
The hire signals OpenAI’s serious commitment to moving beyond conversational AI into territory where agents can take autonomous action on users’ behalf. While the company has made moves in this direction with products like ChatGPT’s browsing capabilities and Code Interpreter, Steinberger brings proven experience in building systems that users trust to manage sensitive workflows like email and calendar management.
His expertise in creating secure, self-hosted solutions could also inform how OpenAI approaches user concerns about privacy and control as agents become more powerful and autonomous. OpenClaw’s architecture—which allowed users to run everything on their own infrastructure while still leveraging powerful language models—demonstrated one approach to balancing capability with user sovereignty.
The emphasis on multi-agent systems in Altman’s announcement also suggests OpenAI may be planning significant new products or features built around agents collaborating with each other. This aligns with broader industry trends, exemplified by projects like MoltBook—a social network where AI agents interact with each other—that have emerged from the OpenClaw community.
The Bigger Picture
Steinberger’s decision to join OpenAI over Meta, despite what appeared to be genuine interest from both sides, may reflect several factors. He had noted having more personal connections at OpenAI and a history of building on their technology. The promise that OpenAI would support OpenClaw as an open-source project may have also been decisive, allowing him to maintain the community he built while gaining the resources of one of the world’s leading AI labs.
For the AI industry more broadly, the move underscores how quickly the landscape is shifting toward agentic systems. What began as Steinberger’s personal experiment just months ago became a viral sensation, attracted acquisition interest from tech giants, and is now positioned to influence the core product direction of OpenAI. That trajectory suggests we’re at an inflection point where AI agents that can autonomously act on users’ behalf are moving from experimental curiosity to mainstream product focus.
As Altman noted, these capabilities are expected to “quickly become core” to OpenAI’s offerings—a statement that hints at significant product announcements in the near future. With Steinberger now on board and OpenClaw continuing as an open-source foundation, the stage is set for a new phase in how we interact with AI systems: not just as tools we prompt, but as agents we delegate to.