OPENCLAW CREATOR PETER STEINBERGER JOINS OPENAI

Your mom just started asking you how to use AI agents. OpenAI has hired OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to lead autonomous AI agent development as CEO Sam Altman advances the company's multi-agent vision. The tipping point for personal agents officially arrived, and OpenAI just won the biggest talent war in AI. ## The Billion Dollar Bidding War Both Meta and OpenAI made concrete offers reportedly valued in the billions for Steinberger, the Austrian developer who turned a weekend project into the fastest-growing AI agent platform in history. The primary attractant was OpenClaw's 196,000 GitHub stars and 2 million weekly visitors rather than its codebase. Mark Zuckerberg personally spent time tinkering with OpenClaw, while Zuckerberg reached out via WhatsApp, and the two spent time arguing about whether Claude Opus or GPT Codex was better. Steinberger, who was hemorrhaging $10,000–$20,000 per month to run the project, chose OpenAI for its potential to accelerate. "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 wrote. He already spent 13 years building PSPDFKit into a $100 million exit and wanted impact over another startup grind. ## From Playground to Platform What started as "WhatsApp Relay" now has over 100,000 GitHub stars and drew 2 million visitors in a single week. OpenClaw achieved popularity in late-January 2026, and on February 14, 2026, Steinberger announced he will be joining OpenAI and the project will be moved to an open-source foundation. OpenClaw is not a traditional coding agent or enterprise tool but a personal agent that operates via messaging apps — WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and iMessage, where users delegate real-world tasks through chat: managing calendars, booking flights, ordering food, handling email. Steinberger's prediction: OpenClaw-style agents will "kill 80% of apps" because "every app is just a very slow API now." That prediction is now OpenAI's corporate strategy. ## The Security Tradeoff Cybersecurity researchers discovered 512 vulnerabilities in a recent OpenClaw audit, eight of which were classified as critical, raising concerns about the suitability of the platform for most users, especially those without advanced technical skills. Steinberger's next mission is to "build an agent that even my mum can use," which will need "a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research". OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support, ensuring the community-driven development continues while OpenAI builds commercial applications on top. OpenAI just bought the future of how humans interact with AI. Expect every other tech giant to scramble for their own OpenClaw equivalent by summer.