OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Sunday that Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, is joining the company to lead personal agent development. The move comes after OpenClaw hit 200,000 GitHub stars in 10 weeks—a growth rate that outpaced React by 20x and revealed something OpenAI couldn't ignore: users overwhelmingly prefer AI agents that run locally on their own hardware rather than sending data to corporate servers.
Steinberger built the first OpenClaw prototype in an hour last November. By early February, it had spawned 1.5 million agents running on users' laptops and Mac Minis, connecting directly to WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and Discord without touching cloud infrastructure. The project's website recorded 2 million visits in a single week following its January 30 rebrand.
While ChatGPT and Claude process billions of prompts through centralized servers, OpenClaw proved a different model could work: autonomous agents executing tasks—booking flights, managing emails, running code—while keeping all data local. Baidu is already integrating the platform directly into its main smartphone app, a company spokesperson confirmed to CNBC.
Why OpenAI moved fast
Steinberger told podcaster Lex Fridman the project cost him $10,000 to $20,000 monthly to run. "Right now, I lose money on this," he said. In a blog post explaining his decision to join OpenAI rather than raise venture funding, he wrote: "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."
OpenClaw will move to an independent foundation and remain open source with OpenAI's continued support, Altman confirmed. "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," Altman wrote on X. "We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings."
The timing matters. Anthropic closed a $380 billion valuation round late last week, driven by Claude Code adoption in enterprise environments. OpenAI's response: talent acquisition at scale. In May 2025, the company spent over $6 billion acquiring Jony Ive's AI devices startup. Meta and Google have spent billions on similar moves, racing to lock in developers building the next generation of AI interfaces.
Steinberger will join OpenAI's Codex team, Financial Times reports. His immediate goal: "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use," he said.
The security tradeoff
OpenClaw's openness created problems. Koi research as of today has discovered 824 malicious skills on ClawHub, the platform's skill registry. Misconfigured instances leaked API keys and credentials. The same local architecture that protects privacy creates vulnerabilities when users grant broad permissions to email accounts, calendars, and messaging platforms.
The name changed twice before settling on OpenClaw. Originally called Clawdbot, Anthropic requested a rebrand over similarities to Claude. It briefly became Moltbot before switching again three days later.
Altman framed the hire explicitly around multi-agent futures: "The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that."
Damilare Odedina
