Sam Altman says OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Sunday on X that Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, the viral AI agent powering the agent-only social network Moltbook, is joining OpenAI. Altman said Steinberger will build the "next generation" of personal AI agents at the company.

"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 said. "We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings." Altman added that OpenClaw, which was for a brief moment in time known as Moltbot and then Clawdbot before Anthropic took notice, will live on as an open-source project supported by OpenAI.

"The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that," he wrote. Steinberger, previously best known for founding the PDF processing company PSPDFKit, came out of retirement to launch OpenClaw in late 2025.

sam altman, peter steinberger, openclaw, openai, moltbook, moltbot, clawdbot, anthropic, personal agents, open source