Peter Steinberger hinted on a podcast last week that something like this might happen. Peter is joining OpenAI, and OpenClaw will stay independent in a new foundation. From Peter’s blog:
When I started exploring AI, my goal was to have fun and inspire people. And here we are, the lobster is taking over the world. My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.
Sam Altman also posted on Twitter / X:
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.
This is a great move. OpenAI has had a lot of momentum recently with Codex. ChatGPT Pulse — which is so expensive that hardly anyone knows about it — is also a perfect fit for some of the ideas behind OpenClaw. In the future we’ll have AI that works in the background much more than it does today, trying to be proactive.
Good luck to Peter. I’m sure it has been overwhelming to keep up with all the attention OpenClaw has gotten in just a few weeks. Hopefully having the resources of such a large company will take some of the pressure off.
