The lobster is joining the lab. Here's

what OpenAI's hire of Peter Steinberger,

inventor of Open Claw, actually means.

So, Peter Steinberger built the fastest

growing open-source project in GitHub

history in his living room, all while

bleeding $20,000 a month. Then, on

Valentine's Day, he posted three

paragraphs on his personal blog

announcing he was joining OpenAI. Sam

Alman followed up with a post on X

calling Steinberger a quote genius that

would drive the next generation of

personal agents. The announcement landed

less than 48 hours after OpenClaw

shipped its most significant security

update ever, patching more than 40

vulnerabilities across the frankly brand

new platform. This is not a coincidence,

and it is not primarily an aqua hire,

even though it's being painted as such.

What happened this weekend is the

clearest signal yet of where the AI

industry is headed in 2026, which is

frankly away from chat bots, toward

agents that do real work on real

computers, and toward the brutal

competitive question of who gets to own

the platform layer underneath them. So

to understand why this hire matters, you

need to understand three things.

[snorts] First, what Open Claw really is

at root. Second, why open AAI needed it

more than Steinberger needed OpenAI. And

third, what changes now for the roughly

200,000 developers who had started the

project on GitHub. First, let's step

back to the Friday night hack that

produced 200,000 GitHub stars. The

origin of Open Claw borders on the

absurd. On a Friday night in November of

2025, Peter Steinberger, who's an

Austrian developer who had already sold

his PDF framework company for over a

hundred million, sat down and built a

prototype in about an hour. The concept

was relatively simple. just wire up a

large language model into WhatsApp so he

could read messages, browse the web, and

execute shell commands on your behalf.

Steinberger had spent three years

deliberately away from tech after his

exit. He went traveling, he did therapy,

he experimented with Iawasa, and he

cycled through what he's described as a

period of deep searching. He came back

to coding because AI pulled him back.

Before Open Claw, he'd turned through 43

different projects. Think about that the

next time your idea fails. Number 44

turned out to be the one for him. The

initial version was quite crude. It

connected a messaging interface to

Claude and Thropics language model and

it could do basic tasks. Ber open

sourced it as quote Claudebot on on

Claude and the lobster claw that became

the project's mascot. By mid January, it

had around 2,000 GitHub stars, which was

respectable for a side project, but not

yet a phenomenon. Then everything

detonated at once. On January 27,

Anthropic's legal team sent a trademark

notice. Claudebot sounded too much like

Claude. Steinberger agreed to rename. He

chose Maltbot. Lobsters malt when they

outgrow their shells. During the

renaming process, in the literal few

seconds between releasing his old GitHub

handle and claiming the new one, crypto

scammers sniped the account and began

promoting a fake Clawude token on

Salana. They served malware from his

GitHub. They hijacked his npm packages.

Steinberger nearly deleted the entire

project. Three days later, he renamed

the project one more time to Open Claw.

This time with purchase domains,

completed trademark searches, and a

coordinated account exchange, which was

executed with what he described as

Manhattan Project level secrecy. He also

spent $10,000 to buy a dormant Twitter

business account to secure the handle.

All of this chaos, paradoxically, was

the accelerant. Each rename triggered

new threads on Reddit and Hacker News.

The the trademark drama drew even more

media coverage. A simultaneous launch of

Multibook, an experimental social

network designed exclusively for AI

agents, went viral with Fortune, CNBC,

and TechCrunch, all covering AI bots

creating their own religions, their

governments, their existential poetry.

Within weeks, Open Claw had soared,

crossing a 100,000 GitHub stars, and it

just kept going. Now it's up to 200,000

stars and it is easily the fastest

growing repository in GitHub's history

with more than 10,000 commits from 600

contributors in under three months. The

numbers do matter, but they obscure a

more important point. OpenClaw proved

that a self-hosted AI agent could do

things that no chatbot had done before.

Ultimately, that's why it grew. It

didn't just answer questions for users.

It managed emails, scheduled meetings,

controlled browsers, executed shell

commands, sent messages across WhatsApp,

Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, and

iMessage. It ran on your hardware if you

wanted it to, and it stored your data

locally, again, if you wanted it to. And

its most unsettling feature, the one

that made researchers both excited and

alarmed, was that it could modify its

own source code. So, that's the story of

Open Claw. Why OpenAI over Meta? Because

both OpenAI and Meta were competing for

Peter Steinberger's attention and for a

stake in that open- source framework.

Before dissecting what OpenAI got, it's

worth understanding the negotiation

Steinberger walked through because the

way he chose reveals what this deal is

really about. Both Mark and Sam made

concrete offers. Zuckerberg reached out

via WhatsApp initially and when

Steinberger suggested they just call

right then instead of scheduling, Zuck

asked for a few minutes, apparently

because he needed to finish coding. That

detail clearly resonated for Peter, a

founder who built his reputation on

shipping. Zuckerberg tried OpenClaw

personally and sent a message calling it

amazing. He also gave really blunt

product feedback, alternating between

praise and pointed criticism. And Peter

valued that directness, noting that

hands-on engagement showed that Zach

actually cared about the product. I

mean, I have yet I have yet to meet a

developer that didn't appreciate

specific and useful product feedback. On

the OpenAI side, Sam's pitch came with

something more tangible. A promise of

computational power tied to the Sarah

deal that could dramatically accelerate

agent performance, plus the fact that

OpenAI was already contributing tokens

to the project. It got lost in all of

the shuffle, but Peter Steinberger built

Open Claw using codecs. Steinberger

described his conversations with Alman

as thoughtful and substantive, and he

also acknowledged having more personal

connections at OpenAI and a deeper

history of building on their tech. But

Peter admitted that he didn't get the

same hands-on product engagement from

OpenAI that he had gotten from Zuck. The

deciding factor appears to have been

mission alignment rather than personal

chemistry. Steinberger's stated goal,

building an agent his mother could use,

requires access to frontier models and

the kind of research pipeline only a

hyperscaler lab could provide. He spent

the week before the announcement in San

Francisco meeting with labs getting

access to unreleased research. And

fundamentally, he came away saying

OpenAI's vision most closely matched his

own. Critically, OpenAI also agreed to

support OpenClaw as an independent open-

source project through a foundation,

which preserves the condition

Steinberger called non-negotiable from

the start. The last thing he wanted was

to have Open Claw become closed source,

to close the claw. His attitude

throughout the process was

characteristically blunt. When

Freriedman asked him if this was the

hardest decision he'd faced, Peter

Steinberger replied, "Nah." The man who

already had a nine-figure exit and had

spent three years soulsearching before

returning to code does not apparently

agonize over these kinds of career

moves. The beauty is if it doesn't work

out, I can just do my own thing again,

he told Freriedman. That posture,

complete optionality, zero desperation

gave him more leverage than most Aqua

hire candidates ever have. So, what did

OpenAI actually get? Open AAI did not

acquire OpenClaw. I want to be precise

about that. Steinberger, the individual,

is joining the company as an employee.

Open Claw itself is moving to an

independent foundation and will remain

open source. Altman confirmed on X that

OpenAI will continue to sponsor the

project. This is a really important

distinction. OpenAI got Steinberger his

vision, his developer credibility, his

community influence, and his proven

ability to build agentic systems. people

actually use. What they did not get is

exclusive control of OpenClaw, the

platform. The Chrome and Chromium model

that Seinberger had floated in his Lex

Freedman interview appears to be roughly

what's taking shape. In other words,

OpenClaw as the open source foundation,

like Chromium, the engine that powers

Chrome, and OpenAI's consumer products

as the polished commercial layer on top

of it, similar to Google's Chrome. That

said, three assets came with Steinberger

that are genuinely hard to replicate.

The first is developer trust.

Steinberger is not a corporate product

manager who shipped an agent from inside

a lab. He's an independent developer who

built OpenClaw in public, bled cash to

keep it running, and routed sponsorship

money to dependencies instead of

pocketing it. And he told Lex on camera

that when it came to the acquisition

talks with Meta and OpenAI, quote, I

don't do this for the money. I don't

give a f. That posture substantiated by

the fact that he'd already had a

nine-figure exit gave him authenticity

with developers that no amount of

marketing spend could manufacture and

that it's hard to get and that it's way.

The second is architectural knowledge.

Open claw is not a toy demo. It is a

platform with a gateway architecture, a

skills marketplace, clawhub, browser

control, cron scheduling, multimodel

support for claude, chat, GPT, Grock,

Deepseek, and other open source LLMs,

and integrations spanning a dozen

messaging platforms. It runs on Mac OS,

Linux, and via Docker. The security

challenges it has faced and the

solutions Steinberger and his community

have developed represent hard one

knowledge about what happens when you

give an AI agent real access to real

systems. That knowledge is directly

transferable to whatever OpenAI is

building next. The third thing that

OpenAI got ironically is community. 600

contributors, a Discord server that

became a gathering point for some of the

most creative and unhinged agent

experiments on the internet. a global

user base that includes developers

building AI controlled mini breweries,

smart home automations and DevOps

pipelines. The Open Claw community is

chaotic, inventive, and deeply invested.

Exactly the kind of ecosystem Open AI

needs if it wants to compete in the

agent layer, and they were very wise to

not claim full control of that

community. It is an open- source

community and would resist that kind of

ownership. The timing of all of this is

not coincidental. It's not even driven

by the popularity of OpenCloud

necessarily, although that was a factor.

Look at what OpenAI is looking at more

broadly across the board in midFebruary

2026. Anthropics Claude code has hit a

billion dollars in annualized revenue in

just 6 months since launch. It has

become the default coding tool for a

generation of developers and its

momentum has showed no signs of slowing

despite continued strong launches from

OpenAI. OpenAI's Codeex product launched

as a Mac OS app in early February was

supposed to be the counter punch and

positioned as a command center for

agentic coding. But Codex is playing

catch-up right now in a market where

developer loyalty is becoming sticky and

switching costs may become real.

Meanwhile, Peter Steinberger has been

walking around for weeks publicly

describing himself as the biggest unpaid

promoter for Codeex. And I have to say

that makes a ton of sense. I've been

saying for a long time that deeply

experienced developers like Peter get

more out of codeex because codeex

optimizes for correct code over long

runs if you specify upfront what you

need with the experience of a senior

developer. That's what Peter is. He's

going to get great results out of

Codeex. He had been building OpenClaw

using OpenAI's models all along. And he

had recorded a three-hour Lex Freriedman

episode, one of the most widely viewed

tech podcasts on Earth, comparing GPT

codeex 5.3 and Claude Opus 4.6 side by

side, arguing that Codeex was reliable

and efficient and that it worked well

for his workflow. His assessment was

nuanced. Claude had stronger role-

playinging ability and was more

interactive, but was impulsive and would

sometimes write code without reading

context. Codeex would read a large

volume of code by default before

starting but was less interactive and

drier in style and then it would just

come back after 20 minutes of silence

with the job done. The bottom line for

him which is similar to what I think is

that skilled developers are going to get

very strong results with any top model

and the differences come down to

post-training goals not raw

intelligence. That kind of detailed,

credible evaluation delivered on camera

by a developer whose project has passed

180,000 GitHub stars heading toward

200,000 GitHub stars. It's worth more to

OpenAI's developer relation strategy

than any marketing campaign. Steinberger

wasn't being paid to say any of this. He

told Lex that joining OpenAI would feel

gratifying because it would finally put

a price on the work he'd done for free.

He described himself as generating a

tremendous amount of value for OpenAI

without compensation by discussing what

Codeex did for him in his role building

open clock. I think he was right. The

Codeex connection runs deeper than an

endorsement. Steinberger's development

workflow is itself a testament to what

OpenAI's coding tools are capable of

doing. He's running four to 10 agents

simultaneously, accumulated 6600 commits

in January alone, and built most of

OpenClaw's codebase by just talking to

AI rather than typing. He practices what

Andre Carpathy calls agentic engineer, a

term he much prefers to vibe coding. His

productivity on OpenClaw demonstrated at

scale what codeex could enable, and that

demonstration drove developers to try

OpenAI's tools. Bringing Steinberger

inside means that connection becomes

structural rather than accidental. The

developer who proved what Codeex could

do in the wild joins the company that

makes codeex. Every future version of

Codeex will benefit from the feedback

loop of someone who has now shipped a

massive 180 to 200,000 star GitHub

project using it. But the developer

angle is only a part of this story. The

deeper strategic logic continues to be

about agents and where they're going in

2026. Open AAI has been talking about

agents for months. Their responses API,

their agents SDK, their agent kit, all

represent building blocks for multi-step

workflows. Codeex has evolved from a

code completion tool into what they

describe as a coding surface, combining

reasoning capable models with developer

tools. Sam Alman told reporters that AI

models don't run out of dopamine and

keep trying because they don't run out

of motivation. apparently unlike

developers who run on pizza. What OpenAI

has not had is a consumer-facing agent

product that people actually use in

daily life to manage real tasks like

email, calendars, messaging, file

management, all top use cases on

OpenClaw today. And that's what OpenClaw

delivers for OpenAI. Steinberger's

stated mission at OpenAI is to build an

agent that even his mom can use and is a

direct acknowledgement that the current

state of Agentic AI is way too technical

for mainstream adoption. The gap between

what OpenClaw demonstrated is possible

and what a normal person can do safely

on their laptop is enormous. Closing

that gap requires access to frontier

models, security research, and

infrastructure that a solo developer

operating at a loss is not going to be

able to sustain. even one with a big

exit like Peter. Sam's announcement made

this very explicit. As he put it,

Steinberger's work on very smart agents

interacting with each other to do useful

things for people would become a part of

our core product offerings. That's not

really a compliment to Peter. That is

Sam saying Peter's vision is going on

OpenAI's roadmap. You can't really

understand this deal though without

understanding the security crisis that

has shadowed Open Claus growth from the

beginning. In late January, security

researcher Mav Leven of Depth first

disclosed a high severity vulnerability

in OpenClaw that allowed a one-click

remote code execution through a crafted

malicious link. The attack chain was

devastatingly simple. Just clicking the

link triggered a cross-sight websocket

hijacking attack because OpenClaw server

did not validate the websocket origin

header. That meant an attacker could

extract the victim's authentication

token and connect to their local Open

Claw gateway, disable all the safety

controls and execute arbitrary commands

even on instances configured to listen

only on local host. If you think that

sounds like they could hijack OpenClaw,

that is the right reading of that bug.

Patch shipped on January 30, but the

broader picture was alarming. Census

identified 21,000 plus exposed openclaw

instances publicly accessible on the

internet, up from around a thousand just

days earlier. Misconfigured instances

were leaking API keys, OOTH tokens, and

plain text credentials. Moltbook's

database was found to expose 35,000

email addresses and 1 and a half million

agent API tokens. Security firm Snick

reported that 7ome% of the nearly 4,000

skills in Clawub mishandled secrets like

API keys through LLM context windows.

The University of Toronto issued a

vulnerability notification. Hacker News

published a detailed writeup. All of

this felt like a blitz of overwhelming

security gaps to Peter. And Peter did

his best. Version 2026.2.1 2.1 shipped

on February 1st brought TLS 1.3 minimum

system prompt guard rails basically a

bunch of basics for security and Peter

kept going the next version shipped

February 7th with an added code safety

scanner and added support for new models

and then version 2026.2.12 2.12 released

February 12th, just 2 days before

Steinberger announced that he was going

to open AI. That was the big one. 40

plus dedicated security patches

addressing prompt injection, rce and

browser control, unauthenticated

configuration tampering, and a bundled

hook identified as quote soul evil that

had inadvertently remained in the

codebase. The timing for all of this

security work is significant.

Steinberger shipped the most

comprehensive security overhaul in Open

Claus history in the same week that he

was finalizing his decision to join

OpenAI. He did not leave the project in

a vulnerable state. He fortified it and

handed it to a foundation. I think this

also explains a part of OpenAI's

calculus. The security challenges

OpenClaw faced are not unique. They are

inherent to the category. Any company

shipping autonomous agents that can

access email, execute shell commands and

manage calendars is going to face these

problems. Steinberger has now lived

through them and Steinberger has

developed practical responses to so many

of them even operating as a solo

developer powered by agents. That kind

of scars on his hands experience is

operationally valuable to OpenAI in a

way that no amount of theoretical

security research is going to be able to

replicate. So here's the question for

all of us. What changes for Open Claw

now? For the 600 contributors and

hundreds of thousands of users, the

immediate answer is both not much and

everything. Open Claw will move to a

foundation structure. It will remain

open source. It will continue supporting

multiple models, not just Open AIs. And

Steinberger has been explicit that the

project should grow to support even more

model providers and companies. OpenAI

has committed to continuing its

sponsorship of the project regardless.

The Chrome Chromium analogy that Peter

used talking to Lex in his interview is

instructive here, although perhaps not

in the way he intended. Chrome is built

on the open-source Chromium project, but

Google's influence on Chromium's

direction is dominant. Google engineers

contribute the majority of commits, set

architectural priorities, and the

features that make it into Chrome shape

what Chromium becomes. Independent

Chromiumbas based browsers like Brave or

Edge operate within a framework largely

defined by Google's priorities.

Obviously, the risk for OpenClaw is

similar. With Steinberger now inside

Open AI, the project's founder and most

prolific contributor will inevitably be

influenced by his employer's priorities.

Features that align with OpenAI's

product roadmap may get faster

attention. Features that compete with

OpenAI's offerings. features. The

foundation structure is designed to

mitigate this. But foundations are only

as independent as their governance

allows. In the details of Open Claus

Foundation, like its board composition,

its funding sources, its contribution

policies, those have all not been

announced. There's also a practical

question about the 3,000 plus open poll

requests that Steinberger mentioned

before the deal. He committed to

processing them regardless of his

decision. But a solo developer becoming

a full-time OpenAI employee will

necessarily have less discretionary time

for open-source maintenance. The

OpenCloud community is going to need to

develop its own leadership bench. The

upside for OpenClaw users is real, too.

Open AAI has resources, compute,

security teams, model access,

infrastructure that an independent

project cannot hope to match. If OpenAI

follows through on its commitment to

sponsor the project in a meaningful way,

which is an if, Open Claw could get more

robust faster than it would have as a

one-person operation hemorrhaging cash.

The security hardening alone could

benefit enormously from access to OpenAI

security research. So, here's the

multi-billion dollar question. Now,

where does OpenAI go? Sam's phrasing

that Steinberger's work would quickly

become core to OpenAI's product offering

suggests a very specific product

direction to me. OpenAI appears to be

building very aggressively toward a

consumer agent product that goes well

beyond Chad GPT's current capabilities.

Consider what OpenAI now has in the

portfolio. Codex handles coding agents.

Chad GPT handles conversational AI. The

responses API, agents SDK, and agent kit

all provide developer infrastructure for

multi-step workflows. What's missing is

a persistent always on personal agent

that manages the messy cross-platform

reality of how people actually use their

computers and phones. The email triage,

the calendar conflicts, the Slack

follow-ups, the file organization, the

proactive task management. That is what

OpenClaude demonstrated was possible.

And that's what Steinberger says he

wants to build at Open AI, an agent his

mother can use. The technical challenges

are formidable here. Open Claw Security

Crisis proved that giving an AI agent

broad access to a user's digital life

creates an attack surface that current

security models really struggle to

contain. Steinberger's own maintainer,

known as Shadow, warned on Discord that

if someone can't understand how to run a

command line, this project is far too

dangerous to use safely. Making that

same capability safe for non-technical

users requires solving problems like

sandboxing, permission management, data

sovereignty, and model reliability

requires solving problems like

sandboxing, permission management, data

sovereignty, and model reliability that

are at the frontier of what anyone in

the industry knows how to do. Sam's

mention of smart agents interacting with

each other also signals an interest in

multi- aent architectures, systems where

specialized agents collaborate on

complex tasks. This aligns with what

OpenAI demonstrated in its harness

engineering case study where a team of

three engineers used codeex to produce

over 1500 pull requests across a million

line codebase with zero human written

code. The extension of that model from

coding to personal productivity seems

like a very natural next step and the

competitive implications here are going

to be significant. Anthropics cloud code

dominates the developer tools market

right now. Google is investing in Gemini

based agent capabilities for the

consumer. metacorted Steinberger

personally with suck reaching out via

WhatsApp and reportedly spending 10

minutes arguing with Peter over whether

claude or chat GPT was the better coding

model. Microsoft which invested heavily

in OpenAI has its own agent ambitions

through co-pilot. Apple has been quiet

but has been benefiting from that run on

Mac minis that Peter sparked through the

open claw project. Steinberger's hire

gives OpenAI a credible claim to win in

the personal agent space. Not because of

any proprietary tech, but because of the

proven execution Peter brings. He built

something 200,000 developers want to

use. He did it in just a few months. And

he did it in a way that generated the

kind of organic enthusiasm that no

marketing budget can buy. Let's step

back and look at the bigger picture

here. Beyond OpenAI, beyond OpenClaw,

Peter told Lex that OpenClaw style

agents would kill 80% of apps. His logic

is pretty simple. Every app is just a

slow API to what the user wants. And an

agent that already knows your location,

your sleep patterns, your stress levels,

and your calendar doesn't need you to

open a separate app to handle things

like fitness tracking, food ordering,

and scheduling. It will just do it. That

prediction may prove aggressive on the

timeline and conservative on the scope.

What I mean by that is that we don't

know when that's going to actually

catch. I know OpenAI is going to be

eager to have personal agents

everywhere, but product market fit is

notoriously difficult to get with

consumers. Open AAI caught Chat GPT

lightning in a bottle once. It's not yet

clear if they can do it twice with a

personal agent. Regardless, the more

fundamental shift is not about replacing

apps, but about changing the interface

layer between humans and software. For

30 years, the dominant paradigm has been

graphical user interfaces, icons, menus,

buttons, and for the past 15, it's been

touch interfaces on mobile. What

OpenClaw demonstrated imperfectly and a

great personal cost to its creator is a

third paradigm, delegation. You don't

tap an icon, you don't type a query, you

just tell the agent what you want done,

and it figures out which APIs to call,

which tools to use, which steps to take.

The fact that this paradigm emerged not

from a corporate lab but from a single

developer's living room in Vienna is

itself instructed. It suggests that the

hard problem in Agentic AI is not

primarily one of model capability. The

underlying LLMs were already good

enough. The primary challenge is one of

integration, persistence, and the

willingness to give an AI system real

access to real things. Steinberger's

contribution was not a new algorithm. It

was glue code, architectural decisions,

a messaging interface, and the audacity

to let an agent modify its own source

code. Now, that legacy of Audacity lives

on inside OpenAI. And the question is

whether it survives the transition from

an indie hacker project into a corporate

product and whether the foundation model

preserves enough independence to keep

the open-source open claw community

invested. The lobster has molted for the

last time. What it grows into next

depends on whether the new shell fits.