OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI to advance personal AI agents

Peter Steinberger, the Austrian software engineer behind the viral open-source AI agent OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI to spearhead development of next-generation personal assistants, as confirmed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a statement on X on Sunday.

Altman said that Steinberger could offer unique perspectives on how advanced agents might work together to accomplish meaningful tasks for people, and that these ideas are expected to quickly integrate into OpenAI’s product lineup.

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. 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. We expect this will quickly become core to our…

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026

The recruitment marks a significant talent acquisition for the San Francisco-based AI lab, bringing in a developer whose autonomous agent captured widespread attention earlier this year.

Steinberger built his reputation as the founder of PSPDFKit, a document-processing toolkit deployed on more than 1 billion devices, before exiting the business after a 13-year run.

His pivot to AI agents began modestly in late 2025 with a side project initially called Clawdbot. Trademark complications forced two rebrands before the tool settled on its current name at the end of January.

The agent, which enables users to delegate tasks through messaging applications, exploded in popularity during the first weeks of 2026, accumulating 198,000 stars on GitHub and drawing two million site visits.

At OpenAI, Steinberger will focus on building personal agents capable of handling complex, real-world tasks autonomously, an area where the company faces intensifying competition from rivals, including Anthropic.