OpenAI has taken a conspicuous step to win the hearts of the developer community and shore up its leadership in agent technology by announcing the hire of Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. Sam Altman posted on X that OpenClaw will be placed into a foundation, remain open-source and independent, and that OpenAI will provide stable, long-term support for the project.
Steinberger confirmed the move on his personal blog, explaining that he joined OpenAI to scale agent technology rapidly to the broadest possible audience and to free himself from the operational burdens of running a fast-growing company. He said he is fundamentally a builder, not a CEO, and that working with OpenAI offers the quickest route to the mission he cares about: making capable, usable agents available to everyone.
OpenClaw has been one of the breakout projects of the past year. Launched in various guises—originally Clawdbot and later Moltbot—its repository has amassed more than 100,000 stars on GitHub and at one point recorded some two million visits in a single week. The project’s practical appeal is straightforward: OpenClaw is an agent framework that can perform real-world tasks such as managing calendars, booking travel and operating inside complex multi-agent environments better than many of its peers.
But the rise of OpenClaw has not been smooth. The project was forced to change its name after a threatened legal dispute with Anthropic, researchers found hundreds of malicious third-party “skills” on its ClawHub marketplace, and a social experiment platform it created—MoltBook—quickly degraded into chaotic human activity after initially serving as an agents-only space. Those incidents underline both the technology’s power and the emergent safety risks that come with rapid adoption.
For OpenAI the hire is a symbolic and strategic win. The company has weathered a string of high-profile departures and public rows in recent years, and bringing the “hottest” agent developer into its fold sends a message of momentum. It also signals OpenAI’s intent to anchor the agent ecosystem around platforms it supports while still courting the open-source communities that helped push the field forward.
The promise to route OpenClaw into a foundation and to keep it open-source is significant but imperfect. Foundations can provide long-term stewardship and decouple governance from corporate incentives, yet much depends on who controls the board, how licensing is structured and whether OpenAI’s funding comes with strings attached. The claim of independence will be tested by governance choices and by the extent to which the project’s road map relies on OpenAI’s compute and model resources.
Security and governance are the other immediate priorities. The discovery of 400-plus malicious skills on ClawHub is a reminder that agent platforms create new vectors for abuse: automated tools that can be composed, monetized and weaponized at scale. Any foundation or steward will need to set robust content and code review processes, transparent moderation rules and technical guardrails if the technology is to move beyond hobbyist use into enterprise and public-service domains.
Strategically, the deal alters competitive dynamics. If OpenAI can credibly guarantee both open-source credentials and improved access to cutting‑edge models, it may reduce fragmentation among startups and independent developers while slowing rivals who hope to build competing agent stacks. At the same time, it elevates the question of centralization in an ecosystem that benefited from a proliferation of independent projects and research labs.
Longer term, the appointment underscores a broader shift in AI: the pivot from single-model capabilities to multi-agent systems that coordinate, delegate and execute complex tasks on users’ behalf. OpenAI’s Altman framed it plainly—multi-agent collaboration will be a defining user experience. That means the winners will not only offer superior models but also safer, developer-friendly infrastructures and governance regimes that win community trust.
There are still critical unknowns. OpenAI and Steinberger have not disclosed deal terms, titles, or compensation. The exact structure of the promised foundation, its governance charter, and the mechanisms that will keep OpenClaw independent in practice remain open questions. How those details are settled will determine whether this becomes a genuine preservation of an open community project or a high-profile absorption that reshapes the agent landscape around a dominant provider.