Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw joins OpenAI, agents to become «core»

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, the open agentic platform you can steer from your favorite app to do lots of useful things, went viral over the last the couple of weeks — with millions of views, downloads, and 100k stars on GitHub.

It also spawned Moltbook, and showed the future of intelligent AI agents for all to see — as the founder, Steinberger, was inundated with investment and job offers.

Now he is joining OpenAI «to drive the next generation of personal agents» on a much larger scale, after touring the frontier labs lately.

OpenClaw will live on in a separate foundation «as an open source project» — while OpenAI’s Sam Altman says «the future is going to be extremely multi-agent,» and that «it’s important to us to support open source as a part of that.»

— My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use, Steinberger says.

Read more: Sam Altman’s announcement, Steinberger’s announcement. See also openclaw.ai.