Who is Peter Steinberger? Quiet builder behind OpenClaw now joining OpenAI

OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger — the founder of OpenClaw and the brain behind the viral AI-only social app Moltbook — to lead what CEO Sam Altman describes as the “next generation of personal agents.”

Altman announced the move on X on 15 February, sounding both excited and certain about the direction the company is taking.

“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 product offerings,” Altman wrote.

He also reassured the open-source community that OpenClaw isn’t going away. “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open-source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” he added.

Steinberger, in his own post, kept it simple and forward-looking, “I’m joining @OpenAI to bring agents to everyone. @OpenClaw is becoming a foundation: open, independent, and just getting started.”

The builder behind it all

OpenClaw may not have been a household name until recently, but it quickly found itself at the centre of online conversations after the rise of Moltbook — an AI-only social platform that went viral for letting autonomous agents interact in a social environment.

At its core, OpenClaw is an open-source framework that allows people to run AI agents directly on their own machines and connect them to apps they already use — from WhatsApp and Telegram to Discord, Slack and Microsoft Teams. For developers and tech enthusiasts, that level of access felt empowering. It meant powerful AI tools weren’t locked behind corporate gates.

Why OpenClaw grabbed attention

Before OpenClaw brought him into the AI spotlight, Steinberger was best known for building PSPDFKit, a cross-platform software development kit that helps developers integrate advanced PDF features — including editing, annotations and digital signatures — into apps.

He scaled that company without taking venture capital, slowly building it into a trusted solution for document workflows across web and mobile platforms. It wasn’t overnight success — it was steady, deliberate work.

In a reshared post, Steinberger revealed he had built 43 different projects before OpenClaw finally took off. In a conversation with Peter Yang, he admitted that after 13 years of building PSPDFKit, he reached a point where he felt “lost.”