In a surprise move that is sending ripples through the AI world, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that Peter Steinberger, the brilliant mind behind the viral open-source AI agent OpenClaw, is joining the company. This hire comes at a pivotal time as tech giants race to develop smarter, more autonomous personal agents that can handle real-world tasks without requiring constant human input.
Peter Steinberger, an Austrian software engineer and the founder of the PDF processing company PSPDFKit, had stepped out of retirement in late 2025 to launch OpenClaw. What started as Clawdbot, then briefly Moltbot, after a naming tweak to avoid similarities with Anthropic’s Claude, evolved into OpenClaw and exploded in popularity. The lightweight AI runs on your own machine, Mac, Windows, or Linux, using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or even local ones, keeping your data private.
OpenClaw is capable of a multitude of tasks, from booking flights and managing calendars to chatting on WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or Slack. It even starred in MoltBook, an agent-only social networking platform where AIs interact autonomously. Steinberger’s creation went viral on social media, drawing a massive number of users and businesses searching for tools that “actually do things,” as OpenClaw’s tagline states.
Altman did not hold back on his 15 February 2026 X post, “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.” He tasked the Austrian with driving the “next generation” of personal AI agents, predicting that they will soon become “core to our product offerings.” Sam also emphasized a multi-agent future, “The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that.”
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
OpenClaw itself won’t fold; it is moving to a dedicated foundation as an open-source project, with ongoing OpenAI support. This keeps the code accessible while supercharging its development in Steinberger’s new surroundings.
Steinberger also brings a rebel edge to OpenAI’s AGI quest. On a Y Combinator podcast in February 2026, he argued, “What can one human being actually achieve? Do you think one human being could make an iPhone or one human being could go to space? As a group we specialize, as a larger society we specialize even more.”
He favors specialized intelligence over broad generality, a view that could reshape how OpenAI builds agents for everyday tasks like sorting emails or negotiating deals.
In his own blog post, Peter explained ditching solo startup potential, “What I want is to change the world, not build a large company, and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.” For OpenAI, reeling from recent talent exits to rivals like Meta, this is a shining opportunity among fierce competition.
AI agents like OpenClaw can act independently, too independently, but this upcoming unification of ideas signals OpenAI’s bet on collaborative, useful bots. Expect faster innovations in personal AI that might handle your life while you focus on the big picture. With Steinberger onboard, the AI agent era feels closer than ever.
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