OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, the developer behind the AI agent OpenClaw, to lead efforts on next-generation personal agents. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, praised Steinberger's innovative ideas in an announcement on X. Steinberger confirmed he will join the company while keeping OpenClaw open-source under a foundation.
On February 15, 2026, Sam Altman announced on X that Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI. Altman described Steinberger as "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." He added that Steinberger's work "will quickly become core to our" efforts at OpenAI.
Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, confirmed the move on his blog, stating, "I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent." He explained his motivation: "What I want is to change the world, not build a larger company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone."
OpenClaw is an AI tool that enables users to create custom agents for tasks such as controlling apps like email, Spotify, and home devices. It supports interactions with services including WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, iMessage, Hue, and Spotify. The project has gained attention for its abilities in writing code, managing inboxes, online shopping, and other assistant functions. It boasts 196,000 GitHub stars and 2 million weekly visitors.
Previously known as "Clawdbot," OpenClaw was renamed after Anthropic objected due to similarities with its Claude branding. It is often compared to Claude Code for automating website development and programming tasks. Altman emphasized the importance of open source, saying, "The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to support open source as part of that." He noted that OpenClaw will continue as an open-source project in a foundation supported by OpenAI.
Reports indicate Steinberger was in discussions with Meta, with both companies offering sums in the billions, attracted primarily by OpenClaw's popularity rather than its codebase, according to Implicator.AI.
