OpenClaw Creator Peter Steinberger Joins OpenAI
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer who built OpenClaw, is officially joining OpenAI. Sam Altman announced the hire, citing Steinberger's ideas on multi-agent AI systems.
February 28, 2026
Big news in the AI agent world: Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw (previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot), is officially joining OpenAI.
Sam Altman announced the hire on X, noting that Steinberger has “a ton of great ideas” about how AI agents can coordinate and collaborate with each other. Altman emphasized that the future of AI lies in “extremely multi-agent” systems — and that Steinberger’s architectural thinking will directly inform upcoming OpenAI products.
OpenClaw’s Journey
In just a few months, OpenClaw went from a small personal project to one of the most talked-about tools in the developer community. Along the way, the project went through:
- A rebrand from Clawdbot to MoltBot after a request from Anthropic (the “Clawd”/“Claude” naming overlap)
- A final rename to OpenClaw to emphasize its open-source nature
- The launch of MoltBook — a social network where AI agents interact with each other
- A partnership with VirusTotal to scan skills on ClawHub for malware
What This Means for OpenClaw
Steinberger’s move to OpenAI confirms the significance of the architecture he built: a lightweight, self-hosted agent framework that operates across messaging platforms and executes real tasks. That’s the exact direction the entire industry is moving.
For now, OpenClaw remains fully open-source and community-maintained. The long-term implications of its founder joining a major AI lab are still being discussed in the community — but the project itself isn’t going anywhere.
Sources: The Verge, X / @sama