OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger hired by OpenAI as AI agent race heats up

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI, according to CEO Sam Altman, marking a major development in the fast growing AI agent space.

In a post on X, Altman announced that Steinberger will join OpenAI and that OpenClaw will “live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support.”

Altman wrote that Steinberger is “joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents.”

“He is 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,” Altman wrote. “We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.”

OpenClaw, previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, was launched last month and quickly gained traction as consumers and businesses showed growing interest in AI agents that can complete tasks and make decisions independently.

OpenAI has been aggressively recruiting top talent as competition intensifies with companies such as Google and Anthropic. OpenAI was most recently valued at $500 billion.

OpenClaw has also expanded rapidly in China and can integrate with Chinese language models and apps. Some researchers have raised concerns about security risks tied to its open framework.