OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian software developer who vibe coded the popular OpenClaw autonomous AI agent, has joined OpenAI.
“My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research,” he shared over the weekend.
The reason why Steinberger chose OpenAI to achieve this goal is, professedly, his lack of interest in building a company and his wish to “change the world” – and do it quickly.
What is OpenClaw?
OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot, then Moltbot) is an open-source AI agent for automating workflows across a number of services.
It connects to variants of external large language models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.), and users interact with it through a chatbot via chat apps like Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, and others.
Its popularity spurred many researchers to investigate, and they discovered alarming security issues: vulnerabilities, exposed and misconfigured instances, susceptiblity to indirect prompt injection, malicious agent skills, and more.
A foundation for OpenClaw
“It’s always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish. Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach,” Steinberger added.
“The community around OpenClaw is something magical and OpenAI has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project. To get this into a proper structure I’m working on making it a foundation.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the move by 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.”
OpenClaw Scanner: Open-source tool detects autonomous AI agents
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