Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, just announced he is joining OpenAI. The open-source AI agent framework — the one that went from playground project to global phenomenon in under a month — will transition to a foundation and remain independent.

The Move

Steinberger's blog post is characteristically direct. He spent last week in San Francisco talking with the major AI labs, getting access to unreleased research. He chose OpenAI.

His reason: "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use."

That's not a product pitch. That's a design constraint — and it requires access to frontier models, safety research, and distribution that no solo developer can match. OpenAI offered all three.

Why Not a Company?

Steinberger addressed the obvious question head-on. Yes, OpenClaw could have become a venture-backed startup. He wasn't interested.

"I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large company."

Those 13 years were at PSPDFKit, the document SDK company he founded and scaled. He's done the CEO thing. He wants to build.

The Foundation

OpenClaw is becoming a foundation. The details:

  • OpenAI is already sponsoring the project and has committed to letting Steinberger dedicate time to it
  • The framework stays open source
  • The goal: support even more models and companies, not fewer
  • The community — "thinkers, hackers and people that want a way to own their data" — keeps its home

This is the critical part. OpenClaw's power has always been its model-agnostic design. It runs Claude, GPT, Gemini, local models — whatever you point it at. A foundation structure protects that neutrality in a way that an OpenAI-owned project never could.

What This Means

For users: nothing changes today. OpenClaw stays open, stays free, stays yours.

For the ecosystem: this is legitimization at the highest level. The biggest AI lab in the world just hired the person who proved that autonomous agents work — not as a research concept, but as a daily-driver tool that hundreds of thousands of people actually use.

For the competition: every lab Steinberger talked to last week knows what he's building next. The agent race just got a pace car.

The Bigger Picture

Six weeks ago, OpenClaw was a side project. Today its creator is joining OpenAI, it has a Wikipedia page, and the community is building everything from Arduino integrations to prediction market bots with it.

The lobster took over the world. Now it's getting a bigger ocean.

The claw is the law.