OpenAI has hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger as it looks to make AI agents central to its products.
CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X that Steinberger will join the company to “drive the next generation of personal agents,” adding that agent capabilities are expected to “quickly become core” to OpenAI’s offerings. He described Steinberger as “a genius” with ideas about “very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people.”
Steinberger confirmed the move in a blog post, writing, “I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone.” The Austrian added that his open-source project, OpenClaw, will move to an independent foundation and “stay open and independent.”
OpenClaw began as what Steinberger called a “playground project,” but evolved into an open-source framework for building AI agents. Since it is open source, anyone can inspect the code, modify it and build on top of it. He said it is a way for people to “own their data.”
CNBC reported that OpenClaw is popular in China and can be paired with DeepSeek and other Chinese language models. It can also work with Chinese messaging apps. Baidu, China’s top search engine, told the media outlet that it plans to add OpenClaw to its main smartphone app.
Steinberger said OpenClaw could become a “huge company,” but the prospect is “not really exciting for me.” He said he already had experience creating a company, but now “what I want is to change the world … and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.”