OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Sunday that the author of the viral AI agent OpenClaw is joining the company, and the service will “live in a foundation as an open-source project that OpenAI will continue to support.”
Previously called Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw was introduced last month by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger. It has gained popular appeal, in part due to social media coverage around it, as consumers and businesses rush to products capable of autonomously performing tasks, making decisions, and acting on behalf of the user without human supervision.
Altman posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) that Steinberger is “joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents.”
He wrote, “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 product offerings.”
Meanwhile, none of the terms were announced, but AI companies, such as OpenAI, have been throwing open their wallets to attract the best AI talent. OpenAI purchased the iPhone designer Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for about $6 billion in May.
Google and Meta have also been incurring billions to attract AI developers and researchers. The latest company to be worth over $500 billion and now aiming to increase its valuation, OpenAI, has very strong competition in the generative AI market, especially against Google and Anthropic, whose AI models are being applied by businesses to perform more business tasks.
The company reported that Claude of Anthropic has been experiencing a certain traction of late courtesy of Claude Code, and the company has recently launched Claude Opus 4.6, which can better code, maintain tasks longer, and produce higher-quality professional work.
In a fundraising round that was closed earlier in the week, Anthropic was worth $380 billion. OpenClaw has rapidly gained popularity in China and can be integrated with Chinese-generated language models, including DeepSeek, and set up to support Chinese messaging apps via customized setups.
A spokesperson informed CNBC that the Chinese search engine Baidu intends to provide the users of its core smartphone application with direct access to OpenClaw.
The vulnerability of OpenClaw concerns some researchers, and the cyberthreats that may arise due to the possibility of tweaking it by users in virtually any way they may consider appropriate.
