Peter Steinberger, creator of the open-source autonomous assistant OpenClaw, has joined ChatGPT's parent company OpenAI. Steinberger's joining is aimed at strengthening the Artificial Intelligence giant's work on next-generation personal AI agents, Social Samosa reported.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced Steinberger's joining through an X post on February 16. Altman wrote, "Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. 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."
"OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that," Altman added.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. 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
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
Who is Peter Steinberger, and what is OpenClaw?
Before OpenClaw became a social media sensation, Peter Steinberger was already known in the tech world. He is the founder and CEO of PSPDFKit, a cross-platform SDK used by developers to add advanced PDF features.
PSPDFKit allows integration of tools like viewing, annotations, editing and digital signatures across platforms. Long before OpenClaw went viral, Steinberger had built his reputation through this developer-focused product.
OpenClaw is an AI agent tool that can be paired with Anthropic, Chinese-developed language models like DeepSeek, etc. What started as a one-hour prototype by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger has now turned into a viral open-source project. OpenClaw, earlier known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, allows users to build personal AI agents and run them locally on their own computers, Financial Times reported.
Also Read | Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra price leaks ahead of launch suggest premium positioning and early launch offers
By the start of February, the project had already created 1.5 million agents. Speaking to podcaster Lex Fridman, Steinberger said it costs between $10,000 and $20,000 a month to run. Both OpenAI and Steinberger said OpenClaw will remain an independent foundation and continue as an open-source project with OpenAI’s support, as per FT.
The project was first inspired by a lobster. The name was changed after it was seen as too similar to Claude, the chatbot developed by AI start-up Anthropic. OpenClaw said Anthropic had requested a name change.
OpenClaw to continue operations
Steinberger had promised an "AI that actually does things." That's how OpenClaw shot into prominence over the last few weeks. OpenClaw manages calendars, books flights, and interacts with other apps for the users.
Also Read | AI Impact Summit 2026 opens in New Delhi with Global leaders and startup powerhouse
Even after Steinberger's OpenAI joining, OpenClaw will continue to operate. The open-source project will run under a foundation backed by Altman's OpenAI. The company has clarified that Peter Steinberger will be leading projects on building advanced multi-agent systems. These systems will be able to collaborate and perform seamless workflows on their own, Social Samosa reported.
