Peter Steinberger: Man who Built Viral AI Assistant OpenClaw Joins OpenAI

Viral AI Assistant tool OpenClaw’s developer Peter Steinberger announced on Saturday that he is joining OpenAI. The developer revealed he will work on bringing agents to everyone, while OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open source and independent.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman stated that Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents and that “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project” that OpenAI will continue to support.

He added that the future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important for them to support open source as part of that.

On Steinberger’s addition to the team Altman said, “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.”

Similarly, about the partnership, Steinberger in his blog said, “The community around OpenClaw is something magical and OpenAI has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project. To get this into a proper structure I’m working on making it a foundation. It will stay a place for thinkers, hackers and people that want a way to own their data, with the goal of supporting even more models and companies.”

What is OpenClaw?

Released in November 2025, OpenClaw is an autonomous AI assistant that performs real-world tasks on behalf of users like managing calendars, sending messages, browsing the web and taking actions that go beyond simple chatbot replies.

The tool went viral soon after launch. It attracted more than 100,000 stars on GitHub and drew about 2 million visitors to its repository in a single week. Its popularity was primarily driven by user interest in tools that can autonomously complete tasks, make decisions and act with minimal human supervision.

The tool is also flexible, as it can be used using any large language model. Several users have paired OpenClaw with Chinese language models such as DeepSeek and configured it to work with local messaging apps through custom setups, helping the project spread quickly in China.

However, Chinese regulators have raised privacy data security concerns around the tool.

China’ Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently warned that improperly configured open-source agents could create security risks, including exposure to cyberattacks and data breaches.