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- Sam Altman says OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI.
- Steinberger says the AI agent could've been a "huge company," but building one didn't excite him.
- Altman said Steinberger will build "next generation" AI agents at OpenAI.
OpenClaw's creator says the viral AI agent had the makings of a "huge company." Instead of building one, he chose the labs.
Peter Steinberger, the creator of the AI agent powering the agent-only social network Moltbook, is joining OpenAI to work on what Sam Altman called the "next generation" of personal AI agents.
Altman announced the hire in a post on X on Sunday, saying Steinberger 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," he added.
Altman said OpenClaw, which was for a brief moment in time known as Moltbot and then Clawdbot before Anthropic took notice, will live on as an open-source project supported by OpenAI.
"The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that," he wrote.
Steinberger said in a post on X on Monday that he is joining OpenAI to "bring agents to everyone."
"@OpenClaw is becoming a foundation: open, independent, and just getting started," he wrote.
In a post on his website, Steinberger said that he "could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company," but added that building one doesn't excite him.
"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 said.
"I'm a builder at heart," he added.
Steinberger also said in a reply on X that he is joining OpenAI "for the mission and because it seemed the best place to build."
"I'll f right off if that changes," he added.
Steinberger, previously best known for founding the PDF processing company PSPDFKit, came out of retirement to launch OpenClaw in late 2025.
He is likely to bring a new perspective to OpenAI's race to develop artificial general intelligence. Steinberger said he believes AGI is best as a specialized form of intelligence rather than a generalized one.
"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?" Steinberger said on a Y Combinator podcast in February. "As a group we specialize, as a larger society we specialize even more."