OpenAI just scored a win in the AI talent wars.
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 would 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 about Steinberger. “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.
He is likely to bring a new perspective to OpenAI’s race to develop artificial general intelligence. Steinberger said he believes AGI is best as a specialized form of intelligence rather than a generalized one.
“What can one human being actually achieve? Do you think one human being could make an iPhone or one human being could go to space?” Steinberger said on a Y Combinator podcast in February. “As a group we specialize, as a larger society we specialize even more.”
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