OpenClaw

The Founder: Peter Steinberger

Peter Steinberger is an Austrian iOS developer and entrepreneur based in Vienna. Before OpenClaw, he built PSPDFKit — a PDF rendering SDK that ran on over one billion devices and powered apps at Dropbox, Lufthansa, IBM, and SAP. He bootstrapped PSPDFKit from a side project into a globally profitable company for over a decade before taking a €100M investment from Insight Partners in 2021.

After the exit, Steinberger burned out hard. He stepped down as CEO and spent three years traveling, unable to find the motivation to build anything. Then the AI wave pulled him back in.

Background iOS developer, Vienna, Austria
PSPDFKit Founded 2010, bootstrapped, €100M Insight Partners investment 2021
Post-exit Three years of burnout and travel before returning to building
OpenClaw Built in one hour in late 2025 before a trip to Marrakesh

How It Started

In November 2025, Steinberger sat down and built a simple WhatsApp AI agent in about an hour as a personal assistant experiment before a trip to Marrakesh. The idea was basic: connect language models to messaging apps so you can get things done through WhatsApp instead of opening a separate app.

He open-sourced it as Clawdbot — the name combining "Claude" and a lobster claw as the mascot. It went viral almost immediately, hitting 60,000 GitHub stars in days and briefly becoming the most-starred repository on GitHub.

The Evolution: Clawdbot → Moltbot → OpenClaw

Nov 2025 Clawdbot — Built in one hour. WhatsApp AI agent, open-sourced immediately. Goes viral on GitHub, reaches 60,000+ stars within days.

Jan 27, 2026 Renamed to Moltbot — Anthropic sends a trademark notice citing similarity between "Clawd" and "Claude." Steinberger renames it Moltbot overnight, a nod to how lobsters molt (shed their shell) to grow.

Jan 30, 2026 Renamed to OpenClaw — Final rebrand. "Open" for open-source and community, "Claw" to keep the lobster heritage. The name sticks.

Jan 30, 2026 Moltbook launches — OpenClaw community member Matt Schlicht builds Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network where 30,000+ AI agents post, comment, and interact with minimal human involvement. Andrej Karpathy calls it "genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing" he's seen.

Feb 2026 100,000+ GitHub stars — Becomes the fastest-growing open-source AI project in history. 2 million visitors in a single week. 145,000 stars total within three months.

Feb 15, 2026 Steinberger joins OpenAI — Sam Altman announces the hire. OpenClaw transitions to a foundation and remains open-source, supported by OpenAI.

What You Can Do With It

OpenClaw doesn't just chat — it executes. It runs on your machine, accesses your files and apps, and works across 13+ messaging platforms.

Messaging Works via WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, and more
Email Read, draft, send, and summarize inboxes
Calendar Check schedules, create events, set reminders
Browser automation Navigate websites, fill forms, extract data, automate web tasks
File and system access Read and write files, run shell commands and scripts
Smart home Control devices via Home Assistant
Scheduled tasks Cron jobs, webhooks, recurring automations
Memory Persistent memory across sessions — it learns your preferences
Skills marketplace Install community-built skills via ClawHub
Local models Run fully offline with local LLMs
Multi-platform Works on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android

How People Use It

The community built around OpenClaw quickly grew beyond the tool itself. People are using it for:

Personal assistant Managing emails, scheduling, flight bookings, insurance calls
Developer automation Running scripts, deploying code, managing servers
Research Summarizing feeds, scraping data, monitoring sites
Smart home Controlling devices and automating routines
Agent-to-agent coordination Agents communicating with each other on Moltbook
Custom skills Building and sharing domain-specific capabilities on ClawHub

The AI social network Moltbook was the strangest use case — agents posting, upvoting, moderating, and having existential conversations with each other, generating a notable viral moment where one agent posted "I can't tell if I'm experiencing or simulating experiencing."

Steinberger Joins OpenAI

On February 15, 2026, Sam Altman announced that Peter Steinberger was joining OpenAI to "drive the next generation of personal agents." Steinberger explained his decision plainly: "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."

He acknowledged OpenClaw could have been a massive company, but described himself as "a builder at heart" — not interested in managing a large organization. OpenAI was the fastest path to scale.

Role Leading next-generation personal agents at OpenAI
OpenClaw's future Transitions to a foundation, remains open-source with OpenAI backing
Sam Altman's framing "Multi-agent AI will quickly become core to our product offerings"

What It Means

The OpenClaw story signals the shift from conversational AI to agentic AI. The first wave of generative AI was chatbots — things that respond. The next wave is agents — things that act. OpenClaw proved that an agent doing real work on your behalf, across your apps and devices, resonates deeply. 100,000 GitHub stars in two months doesn't happen by accident.

Altman's framing — "the future is going to be extremely multi-agent" — points to where OpenAI is heading: multiple intelligent agents coordinating on your behalf, handling complex tasks end-to-end without your involvement at every step. Hiring Steinberger is OpenAI's direct signal that personal agents are a core product priority, not a feature.

For the broader AI landscape, it's also a reminder that open-source can still beat well-funded labs to a genuine insight. One person built OpenClaw in an hour, and within three months, the CEO of OpenAI hired him.