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OpenAI Hires OpenClaw Creator. 198K GitHub Stars Acquired.

Steinberger chose speed over independence. The agent era accelerates.

Peter Steinberger had billion-dollar bids from both Meta and OpenAI on the table. He was losing $20,000 per month running the project. Today, Sam Altman announced on X that Steinberger is joining OpenAI, and that OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open-source project that OpenAI will continue to support.

The Austrian developer built what might be the fastest-growing open-source AI project in history: 198,000 GitHub stars, 2 million site visits, and a global community of contributors, all in under two months.

What Is OpenClaw

OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent platform that functions as a personal assistant capable of autonomously completing tasks: managing calendars, booking flights, sending emails, and interacting with web services. Think of it as a self-modifying AI assistant that can actually execute actions in the real world, not just generate text.

The project had a turbulent naming history. It started as Clawdbot, but Anthropic took action due to the name's similarity to Claude. Steinberger renamed it to Moltbot, then eventually settled on OpenClaw after coordinating with Sam Altman to confirm no trademark issues. The second rebrand required what Steinberger described as a coordinated operation: decoy names, simultaneous platform changes, and ten hours of Codex-related modifications, all to stay ahead of crypto scammers who had exploited the previous rename to distribute malware.

Why Steinberger Chose OpenAI Over Meta

Both Meta and OpenAI made compelling pitches. On Meta's side, Mark Zuckerberg and other executives personally tested the product, wrote code, gave feedback, and debated technical details. Meta pitched a vision of embedding AI agents into social commerce, backed by a $135 billion AI infrastructure roadmap.

OpenAI's pitch was simpler: speed. Steinberger wrote in his blog post that he chose OpenAI because it provided the fastest path to bringing autonomous agents to everyone. He was explicit that building a large company did not interest him. He had already done that with PSPDFKit, a document-processing toolkit deployed on over 1 billion devices, which he sold for over $100 million.

At OpenAI, Steinberger will focus on building personal agents capable of handling complex, real-world tasks autonomously. Altman described this as core to OpenAI's future product roadmap.

The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters for AI Agents

Steinberger predicts that OpenClaw-style agents will make 80% of current apps unnecessary. His reasoning: every app is already a slow API, whether its developers intend it or not. When an AI agent knows your location, sleep patterns, stress levels, and preferences, dedicated single-purpose apps become redundant. Why open a food delivery app when your agent can get food delivered, schedule your meetings, and manage your calendar proactively?

OpenClaw has already spread rapidly in China, where it pairs with models like DeepSeek and integrates with Chinese messaging apps. Baidu plans to give users of its main smartphone app direct access to OpenClaw. This global adoption, combined with OpenAI's infrastructure, positions the project at the center of the emerging agent economy.

The competitive landscape matters here. Anthropic recently launched Claude Opus 4.6 and was valued at $380 billion. Google continues pushing its own agent capabilities. OpenAI, valued at $500 billion, now has the creator of the most popular open-source agent platform building its next generation of personal AI tools.

The most interesting question is not whether OpenAI can integrate OpenClaw, but what happens when the most popular open-source agent framework has direct access to OpenAI's models, compute, and distribution. If Steinberger's prediction is right that 80% of apps become obsolete, this hire is the moment OpenAI positioned itself to own that transition.