OpenClaw Creator Joins OpenAI, Project Moves to Independent Foundation

Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind viral AI assistant OpenClaw, announced Monday he is joining OpenAI to work on personal AI agents, while his open-source project will transition to an independent foundation.

The move marks a significant shift in the AI agent landscape for developers who have been building on OpenClaw's open-source infrastructure. Steinberger confirmed that OpenAI will sponsor the project and has committed to keeping it open and independent.

"The community around OpenClaw is something magical and OpenAI has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it," Steinberger wrote in a blog post announcing the decision.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman framed the hire as central to the company's product strategy, calling Steinberger "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."

"We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings," Altman wrote on X. "The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that."

What This Means for Developers

For the developer community that has formed around OpenClaw, the foundation model offers some reassurance about the project's independence. Steinberger said the foundation "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."

The project, which gained viral popularity after launching in late 2025, has already weathered multiple name changes—from Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw—following trademark concerns from Anthropic. Its promise to be the "AI that actually does things" resonated with developers building agent-based applications.

Steinberger acknowledged that OpenClaw could have become a major company but said that path didn't interest him. "I'm a builder at heart. I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it," he wrote, referencing his previous work founding PDF processing company PSPDFKit.

In a reply on X, Steinberger added a caveat about his new employer: "I'll f right off if that changes."

Details on the foundation's governance structure and timeline remain unconfirmed.