Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, previously known as Moltbot, and before that Clawdbot, is joining OpenAI, the company that kicked off the LLM chatbot craze in late 2022.
According to Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, Steinberger is joining to "drive the next generation of personal agents," something Altman believes will quickly become core to OpenAI"s product offerings
Peter 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. We expect this will quickly become core to our…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
Steinberger, in a personal blog post, revealed that he felt overwhelmed by all the advice, investment inquiries, and varied directions flowing in since OpenClaw blew up last month. He promises OpenClaw will remain open source and move to a foundation, stating:
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. The more I talked with the people there, the clearer it became that we both share the same vision.
I’m working on making [OpenClaw] a foundation. It 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.
OpenClaw is a personal AI assistant; you give it a bunch of instructions, then it uses large language models to understand what you want, plan out steps, and execute those actions across different platforms, automating tasks for you.
The project had a bit of an identity crisis, facing trademark complaints from Anthropic due to the phonetic similarity between "Clawd" and "Claude," making it settle for Moltbot, only for the name to change again to OpenClaw because "Moltbot never quite rolled off the tongue."
The project blew up last month, in part thanks to Moltbook, a separate vibe-coded project by Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane AI. Moltbook acts like a social network exclusively for AI agents, allowing them to post and interact in "submolts."
However, a significant security incident earlier this month exposed its Supabase database, leaving over 20,000 email addresses, 1.5 million API keys, 4.75 million exposed records, and over 4,000 private messages between agents out in the open.