OpenClaw may be AI's biggest inflection point since ChatGPT, and it now has a special relationship with OpenAI.
On Sunday, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger announced that he was "joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone." He also stated that the OpenClaw project itself would "move to a foundation and stay open and independent."
This doesn't come as a surprise after Steinberger was interviewed on the Lex Fridman podcast at the end of last week and said that VCs had been chasing him to give him money to turn OpenClaw into a company. But, Steinberger told Fridman that the alternative path was to work with one of the big AI labs and that "Meta and OpenAI seem the most interesting." He said his condition was that the project remain open-source and perhaps follow a model similar to Google's Chrome and Chromium.
"I think this is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs," Steinberger said.
OpenClaw has become the biggest story in AI so far in 2026, stealing the spotlight from Anthropic's Claude Code and Claude Cowork, two other agentic solutions that have also begun to change the way people work. But OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot) has been a runaway freight train of momentum since it went viral at the end of January.
There have been two main reasons for OpenClaw's rapid popularity:
- It's largely viewed as the most independent and capable personal AI agent; once you set it up, it can figure out creative ways to do tasks you tell it, but it can also learn about you and proactively suggest things it could help you with
- One of OpenClaw's biggest innovations is relatively simple: the ability to send it instructions from messaging apps such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Slack and have it carry out those tasks even when you're not at your computer
OpenAI is clearly thrilled with the Steinberger deal, as three of its top executives, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Fidji Simo, all tweeted about it on Sunday night.
"I'm very excited to make this into a version that I can get to a lot of people, because this is the year of personal agents and I think that's the future," Steinberger said. "And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with the big labs."