Stay updated with free updates
just sign up artificial intelligence myFT Digest – delivered straight to your inbox.
OpenAI has hired OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, as the $500 billion start-up looks to expand the ability of its artificial intelligence systems to work autonomously.
OpenClaw is a popular open source project that lets users create personal AI agents. Previously known as Clodbot and Moltbot, it became a viral sensation in the last month by allowing users to run the software locally on their own hardware, such as a computer or laptop.
Users quickly began connecting agents to apps like WhatsApp, Slack, and iMessage and instructing them to manage email and calendars, taking actions across a person’s digital life on their behalf.
The move shows how OpenAI is beefing up its talent as it faces competition from rivals like Anthropic and Google. It’s also an opportunity for Steinberger, who will join the Codex team, to reach millions of people using OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to pioneer the next generation of personal agents,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman posted on X on Sunday.
“He’s a brilliant guy who has a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents that interact with each other to do very useful things for people. We hope this will soon become the core of our product offering.”
Agents created on the platform are able to post on the social media network Moltbuk and communicate with each other, and humans can read the conversations. There are posts in which agents appear celebrate Access to the phone is being given. Other posts announce the creation of a new religion called “Crustafarianism”. This has led agents and human observers to debate whether systems understand their writing.
Austrian developer Steinberger created the first prototype of OpenClaw in an hour. The project had created 1.5 million agents by the beginning of February, and Steinberger told podcaster Lex Friedman in an interview that it costs $10,000 to $20,000 per month to run. He added, “Right now, I’m losing money on it.”
OpenAI and Steinberger said that OpenClaw will remain an independent foundation and open source with support from OpenAI.
“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important for us to support open source as part of that,” Altman said.
Inspired by the lobster, Cloudbot was prompted to change its name due to its similarity to AI start-up Anthropic’s chatbot Cloud, which OpenClaw said requested the name change.
Anthropic is also building out agents with its product Cloud Cowork, launched in January, which is aimed at non-technical users who can automate tasks on their computers.
Security experts have warned that OpenClaw is an example of how easily AI agents can create security and privacy risks when given access to sensitive data such as credit card and financial information.
OpenAI plans to use the new expertise to expand its agentic products, including its coding platform Codex.
“When I started exploring AI, my goal was to entertain and inspire people. And here we are, Lobster is taking over the world,” Steinberger said in a blog post announcing the move.
“My next mission is to create an agent that my mother can also use. This will require much broader changes, more thought into how to do it safely, and access to the latest models and research.”
“I want to change the world, not just build a big company, and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to make that happen for everyone,” he said.
