“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
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. X

“He is a genius with a wealth of brilliant ideas about a future in which intelligent agents interact with one another and perform genuinely useful tasks for people. We expect this to quickly become a core part of our product offerings,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Altman also added that OpenClaw will continue to operate as an open project, with support from OpenAI.

“I want to change the world, not build a large corporation, and partnering with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring that to everyone,” Steinberger wrote in his blog.

OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot) is an open-source service that gained popularity in late January. It allows users to create AI agents that run locally on their own devices.

Tensions with the crypto community

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Steinberger spoke about the backlash he faced from parts of the crypto community. At one point, he even considered shutting the project down entirely.

“I didn’t realize they weren’t just good at harassment, but also extremely skilled at using scripts and tools. I underestimated these people. Honestly, I was close to just deleting it [Clawdbot],” he said.

Steinberger has no interest in issuing or promoting a token, despite persistent pressure from users. Members of the community created a digital asset on their own and began demanding that the developer acknowledge it, collect fees, and actively promote its growth. They spammed Discord and X with these demands.

As a result, Steinberger was accused of refusing to “pump” the token. At the same time, crypto scammers attempted to compromise his GitHub account, and during the project’s rebranding, usernames were quickly hijacked to promote new digital assets.

“This is the worst form of online harassment I’ve ever experienced,” Steinberger emphasized.