OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, creator of the viral OpenClaw AI assistant, to spearhead development of what CEO Sam Altman describes as “the next generation of personal agents.”
The move comes weeks after OpenClaw, previously known as Clawdbot and then Moltbot, achieved explosive popularity despite security researchers warning of serious vulnerabilities in the open-source tool.
Steinberger will join OpenAI full-time to drive the company’s personal agent strategy. OpenClaw will operate as an open source project under an independent foundation that OpenAI will support, Altman said on X.
“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” Altman wrote.
The appointment is significant because OpenClaw demonstrated strong market demand for agents that can execute tasks autonomously, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. The project accumulated over 145,000 GitHub stars in weeks despite security concerns.
“The hiring matters because OpenClaw sits at the edge where conversational AI becomes actionable AI,” Gogia said. “It moves from drafting to doing.”
In a blog post, Steinberger said the opportunity to build agents at scale convinced him to join a large organization after years of entrepreneurship. “The vision of truly useful personal agents — ones that can help with real work, not just answer questions — requires resources and infrastructure that only a handful of companies can provide,” he wrote.
He said OpenClaw will continue evolving as an open-source project. “This isn’t an acqui-hire where a project gets shut down. I’ll still be involved in guiding its direction, just with significantly more resources behind it.”
OpenClaw gives AI models the ability to interact with desktop environments, executing actions like clicking buttons, filling forms, and navigating between applications. Unlike traditional robotic process automation tools relying on pre-programmed scripts, OpenClaw-powered agents can adapt to interface changes and make contextual decisions.
Steinberger, who founded and sold PDF toolkit company PSPDFKit to Nutrient in 2024, began OpenClaw as a weekend project in November 2025.
Orchestration over intelligence
Altman’s emphasis on multi-agent systems reflects a broader competitive shift in AI, according to analysts. The race is moving from model intelligence to runtime orchestration.
That orchestration layer, encompassing model coordination, tool invocation, persistent context management, connector standards, identity enforcement, policy controls, and human override mechanisms, is becoming the competitive battleground, Gogia said.
“What differentiates vendors now is not the existence of agents, but how they structure control,” Gogia added.
Anthropic has advanced computer use patterns in Claude, Microsoft has invested heavily in multi-agent orchestration through AutoGen and Copilot, and Google’s Project Astra points toward ambient multimodal assistance.
Deployment lags hype
Despite the competitive rush, enterprise deployment remains limited. According to Gartner research, only 8% of organizations have AI agents in production. Success rates drop sharply as agent workflows scale, with compound reliability falling below 50% after just thirteen sequential steps, even assuming 95% per-step reliability.
“It will still take a few years for AI agents to handle complex, multistep workflows,” said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner. “Organizations would essentially need ‘an agentic brain’, something that can create, run, and manage workflows.”
Security poses another challenge. Prompt injection becomes more dangerous when agents can take actions, and agents require governance similar to privileged user accounts—including role-based permissions, audit logging, and human checkpoints for critical actions.
Currently, agents are seeing success in bounded use cases like IT ticket triage and data extraction, but struggle with cross-system workflows involving financial commitments or regulated decisions.
Open-source commitment
OpenAI’s decision to maintain OpenClaw as an open source project could help address some enterprise security concerns by allowing organizations to audit code and customize implementations. However, open-source transparency alone doesn’t eliminate enterprise requirements around security controls, support models, and accountability, according to Gogia.
Neither Altman nor Steinberger provided specifics about when agent capabilities might appear in OpenAI’s commercial products, though Altman indicated the technology would “quickly become core to our product offerings.”
Questions remain about how OpenClaw’s framework will integrate with OpenAI’s existing products and whether OpenAI will address security concerns that affected the open-source version.
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