OpenAI Just Hired the Creator of Moltbot to Power Personal AI Agents

The solo developer behind the viral AI agent called Moltbot (later rebranded to Clawdbot and then OpenClaw) is joining OpenAI. Peter Steinberger, who developed OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent recently made headlines as it could reschedule flights, send messages, and access apps as well. Moltbot showcased the power of agentic AI on a local machine.

Peter Steinberger Will Work on Personal Agents at OpenAI

OpenClaw/Moltbot got a huge traction and received more than 100k starts on GitHub. Now, its developer is joining OpenAI to work on personal and multi-agent systems. OpenClaw, on the other hand, will remain open-source, and it will move into an independent open-source foundation with OpenAI’s support.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on 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“.

In case you are unaware about what Moltbot/OpenClaw is, it provided a chatbot-like interface, but runs locally on your machine. You can connect the local chatbot with a cloud model for advanced reasoning. Now, simply type in your instructions and OpenClaw will execute actions on your behalf.

You can even run OpenClaw on Windows and Linux systems. For macOS users, you can follow our tutorial and learn how to set up Moltbot on a Mac Mini. In terms of agentic AI experience, Anthropic has been leading the race with its Claude Code tool. The company recently released a user-friendly Claude Cowork AI tool for personal users which can access your files, and run multistep tasks just like OpenClaw.