OpenAI Bought OpenClaw
Damn…
Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI.
If you a bit into AI, you probably don’t know who that is, but if not: he’s the guy who built OpenClaw, the thing that lets AI actually control your computer instead of just telling you how to do it yourself.
And not like Claude Cowork. 100x better.
My first thought was damn. Pete chose the worst AI company he could have… unfortunately.
What OpenClaw Actually Does
OpenClaw — formerly called ClawdBot and Moltbot — is a framework that makes AI agents do real things. Like real things. On your machine.
Open your apps. Buy stuff. Book your flights. Click actual buttons. Not write instructions for you to follow. Actually do it. 100x deeper integrated than other AI tools.
Steinberger started it as a side project in November 2025.
And it blew up FAST. The GitHub repo exploded in days. Hundreds of thousands of stars. YouTube is full of OpenClaw videos. It’s… scary, frankly.
So, it was just a matter of time that tool got bought out.
And now, by February 2026, Sam Altman’s tweeting about hiring Pete, calling him a “genius” with “amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other.”
He is.
I still don’t like this. OpenAI just integrated ads into ChatGPT. And it burns through billions like my daughter does through play money.
I am not a fan of OpenAI. The moment they added ads, I deleted my account. Not really only because of ads. I use Google. They’re the ad kings, obviously. But I just don’t think OpenAI’s future looks bright. Well, maybe now with Pete and OpenClaw, it does.
The main thing: OpenClaw stays open source. They say. We hope.
OpenAI says they’ll support it as an independent foundation. That rarely happens. When big companies hire founders, they usually kill the project or absorb it. This one’s supposedly staying independent.
We’ll see.
The Chatbot Era May Have Just Ended
For three years now, we’ve been asking questions and getting answers in a chatbot window. ChatGPT writes something, you copy it, edit it, paste it somewhere else. That’s been the whole workflow.
That’s over.
Nobody’s competing on “better answers” anymore. Not really.
The fight now is about who builds the best orchestration system. Who can run multiple agents at once? Who can keep them secure? Who can integrate into actual systems people use without everything breaking? And without actually looking at them often.
Not which model is smartest. Which platform can execute tasks without you babysitting it.
OpenAI doesn’t want to be your writing buddy anymore. They want to be the infrastructure. The OS for agents that run in the background doing your work.
Different product. Like OpenClaw is. It seriously powerful and seriously scary, because now, at least, it’s a security nightmare. People can use it for almost anything. And regular people don’t really know how to make it secure.
The Deal
Steinberger could’ve raised millions and built OpenClaw into a company himself. In a podcast with Lex Fridman, he hinted that this wasn’t his favorite idea.
Hu must have met with all major AI companies, but in the podcast two seem to standout as the winners, Meta and OpenAI. And OpenAI took the cake.
Now OpenClaw is OpenAI. Basically. 145,000 GitHub stars. Viral growth. Product-market fit.
Questions I have: Is OpenAI keeping OpenClaw open source because they actually care about developer freedom? Or is this just positioning? Get developers invested in the open source version, then monetize the hell out of enterprise features?
Maybe both.
Where This Goes
OpenAI got OpenClaw. But that’s not the only thing happening. People know how OpenClaw works.
Other AI companies will build on that. Anthropic’s building agents into Claude, pretty successfully. Microsoft’s doing multi-agent. Google too.
They’re all in.
As I said, it’s not about which model gives smarter answers. It’s about who controls the execution layer. Who figures out how to make agents reliable and secure without either locking everyone into walled gardens or creating security disasters?
This is the race at the moment.
Chatbots are boring. Execution is cool.
The Bottom Line
OpenClaw is OpenAI now.
Big step that’s just the beginning. 2026 will be huge.
And I bet Meta is pissed Pete didn’t take their offer. So, they’ll build something very soon, I guarantee.
And I am still very eager to see what Apple does this year when they use Gemini to power Apple Intelligence.
We’ll see.