OpenClaw Creator Peter Steinberger Joins OpenAI After Zuckerberg and Altman Calls

Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI to lead the development of next-generation personal AI agents, marking a significant talent acquisition for the AI company. Steinberger announced his move on X, where Sam Altman praised him as "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."

Steinberger's journey to OpenAI involved conversations with some of tech's most influential figures. In a recent podcast, he revealed that Mark Zuckerberg had called him on WhatsApp without scheduling, finishing code during their ten-minute conversation. He also described phone calls with Sam Altman and said he had been contacted by "every big VC" interested in his work.

OpenClaw, which Steinberger created, is an open-source platform for building AI agents. The project will continue to remain open source despite Steinberger's move to OpenAI, ensuring the community can still benefit from and contribute to the technology.

The acquisition represents OpenAI's continued push to strengthen its position in the competitive AI agent space. Personal agents that can autonomously perform tasks and interact with other agents represent one of the next major frontiers in AI development.

Steinberger's expertise in building intelligent systems that can work together autonomously aligns with OpenAI's vision for the future of AI. His background suggests he'll be working on making AI agents more capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks without constant human oversight.

This move comes as the AI industry sees increasing consolidation of talent, with major companies competing to attract the best minds in the field. Steinberger's combination of technical expertise and vision for agent-based systems made him a prime target for OpenAI's expansion efforts.

The timing is notable as OpenAI continues to evolve beyond its initial chatbot offerings into more sophisticated AI systems that can act as true digital assistants. Steinberger's work on OpenClaw provides a foundation that OpenAI can build upon as it develops these next-generation capabilities.

For the open-source community, the continuation of OpenClaw as an open project ensures that the innovations Steinberger helped create will remain accessible, even as he brings his expertise to OpenAI's commercial efforts.

This acquisition follows a pattern of OpenAI bringing in specialized talent to accelerate its development of more advanced AI systems, particularly in areas like autonomous agents and multi-agent interactions that represent the next wave of AI innovation.