OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger has joined the OpenAI team, signalling a stronger push into AI personal agent technology. CEO Sam Altman stated that Steinberger will contribute to the development of next-generation AI personal agents. It is also an opportunity for Steinberger to reach the people using OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Steinberger has shared the news of joining OpenAI in a post on his website titled ‘OpenClaw, OpenAI, and the future’, writing that he will join OpenAI to be “part of the frontier of AI research and development and continue building.”
In a post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Sam Altman said Steinberger will “drive the next generation” of products. “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 product offerings,” Altman wrote.
Peter Steinberger is an Austrian software engineer and the creator of the open-source AI agent project OpenClaw. OpenClaw received viral traction for its ability to handle real-world tasks autonomously. He is also a successful entrepreneur and developer of PSPDFKit.
OpenClaw is a popular open-source artificial intelligence program. According to Altman, “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open-source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent, and it's important to us to support open source as part of that.”
Modern AI agents are autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning, and executing tasks independently. Peter Steinberger’s hiring signals OpenAI’s deeper push into agent-driven computing to advance its ambition to build proactive, task-oriented AI systems that integrate easily into users’ daily digital environments.
“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,” Steinberger said in a blog post recently.
“It’s always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish. 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,” he added.
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OpenAI, which was recently valued at US$500bn, faces intense competition in the generative AI market from Google and Anthropic. Anthropic’s Claude has been getting particular traction due to Claude Code. The company recently introduced Claude Opus 4.6. Anthropic, which was valued at US$380bn in a fundraising round that closed earlier in the week.
On the other hand, OpenClaw spread quickly in China. There were reports of a possible pairing between Chinese-developed language models, such as DeepSeek and OpenClaw.
Chinese search engine Baidu also planned to give users of its main smartphone app direct access to OpenClaw, according to CNBC.
The race to build advanced AI agents is intensifying. As enterprises seek tools capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks, competition is shifting toward reliability, scalability, and real-world utility, which makes talent acquisition and rapid innovation critical differentiators.