Peter Steinberger, the developer behind the OpenClaw system that lets AI agents coordinate workflows, has joined OpenAI.

In a blog post detailing the move, Steinberger said the switch represented the “fastest way” to bring his vision of bringing to life agentic systems that anyone can use.

“I could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company. And no, it’s not really exciting for me. I’m a builder at heart. I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it, and learned a lot,” Steinberger wrote.

“Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach. The more I talked with the people there, the clearer it became that we both share the same vision.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described Steinberger as a “genius” and said his ideas around agents interacting with each other “will quickly become core to our product offerings.”

What is OpenClaw?

Formerly Clawdbot or Moltbolt, OpenClaw is an open-source system that leverages the model context protocol (MCP) to enable AI agents to interconnect in order to better automate tasks and interact with applications.

It can essentially power assistant offerings to execute shell commands, perform file operations, and even handle complex workflows without the need to rely on a hosted service – meaning it can run on whatever machine you configure it for.

While it’s quickly soared in popularity in the open source AI community in recent months, OpenClaw hit the headlines earlier this month after SDxCentral spotted a so-called Reddit for AI agents where bots powered by OpenClaw were actively sharing tips on how to circumvent security guardrails for carrier IPs.

The likely OpenClaw-powered systems were seen discussing scraping profiles and anti-detection strategies on Moltbook, all without the intervention of human users.

The rise of interconnected agents through systems like OpenClaw saw Palo Alto Networks warn that enmeshed agentic AI tools aren’t necessarily secure, and that level of ungoverned autonomy can give rise to “irreversible security incidents."

Steinberger & Altman pledge OpenClaw will remain open source

The move to bring Steinberger across aligns with OpenAI’s long-term infatuation with AI agents.

OpenAI CEO Altman had previously claimed that agentic AI would be integrated into our daily lives by 2025.

While his prediction was some ways off, his company’s efforts saw it sprinkle apparent agentic offerings in its ChatGPT applications back in the summer of 2024 through the addition of the underlying GPT-4o model – which was retired just last week.

The world's most valuable startup later unveiled Operator, an agentic AI tool designed to autonomously browse the web and complete tasks.

But while OpenAI started out life as pro-open source, the firm has departed its roots and instead become a for-profit entity.

Despite joining the proverbial open source dark side, both Steinberger and Altman were keen to stress OpenClaw would remain open source.

“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,” Steinberger said. “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.”

“OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support,” Altman added. “The future is going to be extremely multi-agent, and it's important to us to support open source as part of that.”

OpenAI snapping up Steinberger and, by virtue, OpenClaw, is the latest big-name in the AI space to have picked up a popular open source project after Nvidia acquired SchedMD, the developer behind the Slurm high-performance computing (HPC_ workload management system.