The father of Clawdbot joined OpenAI

“Peter Steinberger will join OpenAI to lead the next generation of personal assistants,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted on personal X on the morning of February 16.

Peter Steinberger, an Austrian programmer, has had many notable products such as PSPDFKit, a powerful toolkit specializing in PDF document processing. In early 2026, Steinberger became globally famous for the OpenClaw project, or previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot. This is an open source AI agent that can run on users’ computers and work on chat applications, to automatically perform many tasks on behalf of humans.

“He’s a genius with a lot of great ideas about the future of smart assistants interacting with each other, to do very useful things for humans,” Altman commented about Steinberger in the post.

On his personal page, Steinberger confirmed the above information. “I joined OpenAI to bring agents to everyone,” he said.

“I’m a builder. What I want is to change the world, not build a big company, and partnering with OpenAI is the fastest way to make that happen,” he added.

Steinberger’s OpenClaw was born in November 2025 with the original name Clawdbot, then had to change its name because it was considered easy to confuse with Anthropic’s “Claude”. This open source product then quickly became famous for its ability to automatically complete tasks, make decisions and act on behalf of users without the need for constant human guidance.

From the foundation of OpenClaw, AI agents even create Moltbook, a social network of agents that communicate with each other without human participation. OpenClaw is also popular in China as it can be combined with Chinese-developed language models, such as DeepSeek, and configured to work with messaging applications through custom settings. However, the product also raises concerns about OpenClaw’s openness and potential cybersecurity threats due to the ability for users to customize it any way they want.

The founder of OpenClaw admitted that his project could absolutely turn into a large company, but said that was “not really interesting”. This is the reason he decided to join OpenAI.

Meanwhile, OpenClaw was confirmed by both Steinberger and Sam Altman to continue to exist within the organization as an open source project and will continue to be supported by OpenAI.

“The future is multi-agent, and supporting open source is important to us in that context,” said OpenAI’s Sam Altman.