OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI, to oversee next-gen ChatGPT AI agents

With OpenClaw moved to a foundation, it will no longer be under the control of any single entity, as it becomes a community-driven setup.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI) evangelist built the OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot) as a solo side project in November 2025, as a multi-task manager. Later, he moved the stack to GitHub, and since then, the community has grown big with more than 180,000 members.

Now, Steinberger has joined OpenAI to lead the development of consumer-facing autonomous agents. He will oversee the work on ChatGPT 6.0 and beyond.

"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," said Sam Altman, CEO, co-founder, OpenAI

"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," noted Altman.

OpenClaw moved to a foundation: What this means

With OpenClaw moving to a foundation, it will remain open source and interested coders on GitHub can make full use of the OpenClaw model to build their own custom AI agents.

OpenClaw will no longer be under the control of any single entity, as it becomes a community-driven setup.

This opens the door for structured contributor participation, and there won't be any fear of corporate-like dominance in deciding the direction of OpenClaw's future growth.

Peter Steinberger, founder, OpenClaw AI.

"It’s always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish. Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach. The more I talked with the people there, the clearer it became that we both share the same vision. The community around OpenClaw is something magical and OpenAI has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project. To get this into a proper structure I’m working on making it a foundation. It will stay a place for thinkers, hackers and people that want a way to own their data, with the goal of supporting even more models and companies,' said Peter Steinberger, founder, OpenClaw AI.

As noted by Altman, Steinger will be overseeing OpenAI's work on next-gen ChatGPT with agentic capabilities.

For the uninitiated, Agentic AI is new form of intelligence model, which can perform any assigned work with less human supervision. Going forward, with advancement in tech, the agentic AI will be able to detect flaws in its code, correct them, fully test it and ensure the software works per the description of the job code.

"Personally, I’m super excited to join OpenAI, be part of the frontier of AI research and development, and continue building with all of you," said Steinberger.

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