OpenAI’s move to hire the creator of OpenClaw, the viral maker of personal artificial intelligence assistants, is proof that there’s still fierce competition for bold and unexpected ideas in artificial intelligence — and the people who come up with them.
Peter Steinberger, an Austrian programmer and entrepreneur Hacking OpenClaw Together OpenAI will be added as a side project in November. His creations will be administered through a separate foundation.
Representatives from Meta Platforms and xAI also met with Steinberg during the whirlwind week he spent in San Francisco in early February, according to people familiar with the matter.
OpenClaw agents act as virtual personal assistants that can perform tasks in the real world. Users communicate with customer service agents through common messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage. The agent then performs tasks such as sending emails and debugging code, or even calling restaurants to make reservations.
Some technology experts have suggested that as more users turn to artificial intelligence to help manage aspects of their lives, OpenClaw may evolve into an operating system that allows people to program their own personal assistants.
The speed with which OpenClaw has spread and Steinberger has become a recruiting target for artificial intelligence players is reminiscent of the early days of Apple’s App Store, where apps developed by individual engineers quickly gained widespread followings. This process created millionaires almost instantly and created an app economy. AI executives and researchers are also willing to bet on ideas like OpenClaw that could become similar ecosystems.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spends billions of dollars License technology and hire researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers, and entrepreneurs to build an AI superteam. That blitz boosted pay for top AI workers across the industry.
Neither Steinberg nor OpenAI disclosed his compensation package. A person familiar with the matter said the deal was worth well under $1 billion.
Steinberg said that after meeting with the AI lab and previewing unpublished research, he chose OpenAI because the company gave him stronger assurances that OpenClaw would remain independent.
Steinberger released OpenClaw in November as an open source project, meaning it is distributed for free and anyone can help create and modify it. in a Saturday Blog Posthe said he is working to establish a foundation with “the appropriate structure” to keep OpenClaw open source.
“To be clear, our mission is to work with and support everyone,” said venture capitalist Dave Morin, who will become the foundation’s first independent board member. “That means all the people, all the labs, all the companies that want to be involved.”
Morin said they are still deciding who the other board members will be. But he said Steinberg and people from OpenAI would be board members.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement X Post on Sunday The company intends to continue supporting OpenClaw as an open source project and reiterated that it will be managed through the foundation.
Altman also said that Steinberg “has a lot of amazing ideas for a future of very smart agents interacting with each other and doing very useful things for people. We expect this will soon become the core of our products.”
According to an OpenAI spokesperson, Steinberg will join the team responsible for OpenAI’s artificial intelligence coding tool Codex. Steinberger often refers to Codex as the tool he used to build OpenClaw.
It’s unclear what he will be working on during his time at OpenAI, but Altman’s X message and Steinberger’s blog post suggest he will be working on personal agents. Steinberg will also have time to continue working on OpenClaw, he said.
Steinberger started building OpenClaw last year as a weekend hobby project. In 2021, he sold a startup for more than $100 million and then entered semi-retirement. He said the rapid development of the latest artificial intelligence coding tools, such as Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, drew him back into building.
Over the past few weeks, assistants born from his projects have gone viral for their brilliance at completing tasks and communicating. OpenClaw reached the peak of its virality in late January, when the AI assistants appeared to start communicating with each other on a Reddit-style forum called Moltbook.
Steinberg was quickly inundated with emails from users looking for a formal customer support team. “It’s just me,” he said.
Then, the AI lab came knocking.
Soon after Steinberg flew from Vienna to San Francisco. He said he stayed with friends in town because he preferred it that way, but also because most hotels were booked for the Super Bowl.
In addition to meeting with the AI Lab, Steinberg has spoken at fireside chats and served as a judge for OpenAI’s Codex hackathon.
That same week, he attended “ClawCon,” a grassroots event curated by OpenClaw users. Fans lined up outside the building, waiting to see Father Claw. Actor and venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher made a surprise visit to ClawCon to meet with Steinberg.
Steinberg said he left before the Super Bowl began and recorded a conversation with podcaster Lex Friedman.
Steinberg grew up on a farm in Austria and split his time between Vienna and London. He said he plans to move to San Francisco for work.
“I never thought my playground project would cause such a stir,” he wrote in a blog post on Saturday. “The Internet is weird again.”
Write to Ouyang Anqi: Angel.au-yeung@wsj.com
