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OpenAI Hires OpenClaw Creator to Lead Personal Agents as Project Moves to Foundation

The hire underscores OpenAI’s push toward multi‑agent systems becoming central to its products.

Overview

  • Sam Altman said Peter Steinberger will drive the next generation of personal agents and that such capabilities are expected to become core to OpenAI’s offerings.
  • OpenClaw will remain open source under a foundation with continued support from OpenAI, and no financial terms or product timeline have been disclosed.
  • OpenClaw surged in popularity in recent weeks, surpassing 100,000 GitHub stars and drawing about 2 million visitors in a single week, according to Steinberger.
  • Officials and researchers have flagged security risks, with China’s industry ministry warning that misconfigured deployments could expose users to cyberattacks and data breaches.
  • The project was rebranded from Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw following an Anthropic trademark objection and gained traction through agent interactions across common apps and the Moltbook community.