Peter Steinberger built the most important open-source AI agent in no time. Now Meta and OpenAI are circling with acquisition offers, he said last week, while crypto scammers turned his rebrand into a 24-hour nightmare that almost made him quit.
The project is currently hemorrhaging $10,000 to $20,000 monthly, he said. Steinberger routes all sponsorship money to dependencies rather than pocketing it. "Right now I lose money on this," he said matter-of-factly, like someone who sold his previous company PSPDFKit and genuinely doesn't care about the cash.
Then crypto scammers struck. In the five seconds between pressing "rename" on two browser windows, bots sniped his accounts. They served malware from his GitHub. They hijacked his NPM packages. His Twitter mentions became unusable spam.
"I was close to crying," Steinberger admitted. "Everything's fucked."
He almost deleted the project entirely. The second rebrand to OpenClaw required Manhattan Project-level secrecy, decoy names, and coordinating account changes across platforms simultaneously to avoid another crypto-scammer feeding frenzy. The attacks were so sophisticated that Steinberger called it "the worst form of online harassment I've experienced."
Steinberger is also a fan of what Andrej Karpathy calls "agentic engineering"—a rejection of the term "vibe coding," which he considers a slur.
Steinberger predicts that OpenClaw-style agents will kill 80% of apps.
"Every app is just a very slow API now, if they want it or not," he told Fridman.
Why pay for MyFitnessPal when your agent already knows your location, sleep patterns, and stress levels? Why open Uber Eats when your assistant can order food, schedule meetings, and manage your calendar proactively?
Steinberger’s program has opened the gates to tech world giants. He told Fridman that he also held conversations with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The dev is now weighing starting his own company with VC backing, but fears it would distract from building. He's considered just continuing to bleed cash and ignore the offers.
"I can't go wrong," he said.
