Illustration of OpenClaw logo on smartphone screen
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Sunday that the developer of the viral AI agent OpenClaw has joined the company, and that the service “will live on in its foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support.”
OpenClaw, previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, was launched last month by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger. Thanks in part to social media attention, their popularity has skyrocketed as consumers and businesses flock to products that can autonomously complete tasks, make decisions and take actions on your behalf without continuous human guidance.
In a post on X, Altman wrote that Steinberger is “joining OpenAI to power the next generation of personal agents.”
“He is a genius with a lot of great ideas about a future in which very smart agents work together to do very useful things for people,” Altman wrote. “We hope this will soon become a core part of our offering.”
Although the conditions have not been disclosed, AI companies including OpenAI are doing their best to recruit talented AI talent. In May, OpenAI acquired io, an AI device startup led by iPhone designer Jony Ive, for more than $6 billion. Meta and google It is spending billions of dollars to attract AI developers and researchers.
OpenAI, which was recently valued at $500 billion and is currently trying to raise that number, faces stiff competition in the generative AI market, particularly from Google and Anthropic, and its AI models are being used by companies to take over more business tasks.
Anthropic’s Claude has been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to Claude Code, and the company recently introduced Claude Opus 4.6. The company says this means you can code better, stay on task longer, and produce higher quality, professional work.
Anthropic was valued at $380 billion in a funding round that closed earlier this week.
OpenClaw is rapidly gaining popularity in China and can be configured to work with Chinese-language messaging apps through a customized setup in combination with Chinese-developed language models such as DeepSeek. Chinese search engine Baidu plans to offer users of its main smartphone app direct access to OpenClaw, a spokesperson told CNBC.
Some researchers are concerned about the potential cyberthreats posed by OpenClaw’s open nature and the ability for users to tweak it in any way they see fit.
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