💥 Boom! OpenAI hires Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw 🦞
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OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project, headed up by @davemorin.
More from @steipete : OpenClaw, OpenAI and the future
Maybe Anthropic shouldn't have exercised their IP after all.
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This is such a missed opportunity by Anthropic.
Raycast
@bensabic oh, they totally blew it.
@chrismessina it's incredible how the models themselves are fantastic, but everything else? Meh. It's almost like there is a disconnect within the company.
Raycast
@bensabic they're still stuck in the capitalist paradigm even as they pursue abundance economics. 🥴
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@bensabic @chrismessina All-time fumble by Anthropic
Termsy
OpenClaw will become as open as OpenAI
As someone running OpenClaw daily with multiple agents handling everything from scheduling to code reviews, this news hits differently when you're a user, not just an observer.
The foundation move is actually the part I care about most. OpenClaw's real moat was never just the code — it's the ecosystem of skills, community contributions, and the fact that it runs locally on your machine with full data ownership. That philosophy surviving under a foundation matters more than who employs the creator.
That said, Peter getting access to frontier models and research at OpenAI could accelerate things significantly. If OpenClaw becomes the bridge between cutting-edge models and local-first agent infrastructure, that's a win for everyone building on it.
Anthropic's loss here isn't just one developer — it's the signal it sends to every open source creator thinking about where to build next.
Interesting move.
OpenClaw going foundation + open source while OpenAI doubles down on multi-agent systems feels strategic. If agents really become core infrastructure, supporting an open ecosystem early could shape the standards instead of fighting them later.
The “agents interacting with agents” part is the real headline here. That’s a much bigger shift than just another model upgrade.
The question is...with OpenClaw remain available to coders/vibecoders/builders, etc. My (underinformed) theory is, while we're in the first throes of the AI 'goldrush', it's only a matter of time until Big Data builds out their MegaBots and closes the moat on us. This feels like the beginning of that. I hope I'm wrong.
I was surprised that only OpenAI and Meta came to Peter Steinberger with offers. It could've been indeed a great opportunity for Anthropic.