OpenAI has roped-in one of the most hyped-up names in t he AI sector to join its team — intensifying competition for its rivals like Anthropic, xAI, and Google among others. Peter Steinberger, the creator of the viral OpenClaw tool — that can be installed on a device to act like a personal assistant AI agent and that can facilitate machine-to-machine conversations.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, officially announced Steinberger’s appointment to the team on Monday through a post on X.
“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,” Altman said.
Building on Altman’s revelation, Steinberger announced that OpenClaw was being converted into an open-source and independent foundation in a bid to “bring AI to everyone”, he claimed.
“I could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company. And no, it’s not really exciting for me. I’m a builder at heart. What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone,” Steinberger said, adding that the next AI product he develops, it would be easy enough for use by his mother.
Industry players like Nothing chief Carl Pei and Ton Wallet have expressed excitement to see what comes out of OpenAI’s collaboration with Steinberger.
Altman has predicted that the future will be extremely multi-agent, hinting that the next line of OpenAI products could have capabilities to interact with each other.