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OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, as the $500bn start-up seeks to expand the ability of its artificial intelligence systems to conduct work autonomously.
OpenClaw is a popular open source project that lets users create personal AI agents. Formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, it became a viral sensation over the past month by allowing users to run the software locally on their own hardware, such as a computer or laptop.
Users quickly began connecting the agents to apps such as WhatsApp, Slack and iMessage and instructing them to manage emails and calendars, taking actions across a person’s digital life on their behalf.
The move demonstrates how OpenAI is bolstering its talent as it faces competition from rivals such as Anthropic and Google. It is also an opportunity for Steinberger, who will join the Codex team, to reach the hundreds of millions of people using OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman posted on X on Sunday.
“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 product offerings.”
Agents created on the platform are able to post on social media network Moltbook and communicate with each other, and humans can read the interactions. There are posts in which the agents appear to celebrate being given access to phones. Other posts declare the creation of a new religion called “Crustafarianism”. This has led to the agents, and human observers, debating whether the systems have an understanding of their writing.
Austrian developer Steinberger built the first prototype of OpenClaw in an hour. The project had created 1.5mn agents by the start of February, and Steinberger told podcaster Lex Fridman in an interview that it cost $10,000 to $20,000 per month to run. “Right now, I lose money on this,” he added.
OpenAI and Steinberger said OpenClaw would remain an independent foundation and would stay open with support from OpenAI.
“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” Altman added.
Inspired by the lobster, Clawdbot was prompted to change its name because of its similarity to the chatbot Claude, from AI start-up Anthropic, which OpenClaw said had requested a name change.
Anthropic has also been building agents, with its product Claude Cowork launched in January, which is aimed at non-technical users who can automate actions on their computers.
Security experts have warned that OpenClaw is an example of how easily AI agents can create security and privacy risks when granted access to sensitive data, such as credit card and financial information.
OpenAI plans to use the new expertise to expand its agentic products, including its coding platform Codex.
“When I started exploring AI, my goal was to have fun and inspire people. And here we are, the lobster is taking over the world,” Steinberger said in a blog post announcing the move.
“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.”
“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,” he added.