OpenAI has brought on OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to lead its push into personal AI agents, as CEO Sam Altman positions multi-agent systems at the center of the company’s next product phase.
Altman said OpenClaw would become a foundation-run open-source project supported by OpenAI, reflecting the company’s belief in an “extremely multi-agent” AI future.
An AI agent is a system designed to take actions on a user’s behalf, such as sending messages, booking services, or managing tasks across apps, instead of just responding to prompts in a chat window. Agents are typically built to connect to external tools, carry out multi-step instructions, and operate with some level of autonomy.
OpenClaw gained traction by enabling persistent agents that connect to messaging platforms and external services, allowing users to run task-executing bots locally rather than relying solely on centralized chat apps like ChatGPT or Claude.
Steinberger said turning OpenClaw into a foundation would allow it to remain a place for “thinkers, hackers, and people who want a way to own their data.”
While only a few months old, the platform has already drawn scrutiny from some of the industry’s largest players.
“Smart move by OpenAI, though I'd argue Anthropic should have got there first,” Dermot McGrath, co-founder at strategy and growth studio ZenGen Labs, told Decrypt.
The concern, McGrath said, is what the support could mean for OpenClaw.
“Open source or not, these projects live and die by a handful of dedicated full-time contributors, and Steinberger is the father of OpenClaw,” McGrath said. “OpenAI says they'll continue to support it, but a big question remains on how much attention the project actually gets once they're building proprietary products.”
Whether OpenAI’s backing can sustain the project’s momentum remains unclear, but given Steinberger’s goal of “building an agent even his mum can use,” McGrath said he expects to see “very cool stuff coming out of OpenAI soon.”
Community directories list over 100 agent skills and extensions that are continuously being built around the project, with a growing ecosystem of contributors and third-party integrations.
