He Built a Viral AI Assistant As a Weekend Side Project. Three Months Later, Three AI Giants Were Fighting Over Him.
OpenAI won a fierce bidding war for Peter Steinberger, the Austrian coder who created OpenClaw in just three months.
It started as a weekend hobby in November. By February, the biggest AI labs in the world were battling to make him a full-time employee. Peter Steinberger, an Austrian coder who sold his last startup for over $100 million, built OpenClaw as a personal AI assistant that lets users communicate with AI agents through WhatsApp and iMessage. The platform can handle tasks like sending emails, debugging code, and making restaurant reservations.
OpenClaw went viral in late January when the AI assistants appeared to start communicating with each other on a Reddit-style forum called Moltbook. Suddenly, Steinberger was fielding meetings with OpenAI, Meta, and xAI during a whirlwind week in San Francisco.
OpenAI won.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
Steinberger says he chose them because they offered stronger guarantees that OpenClaw would remain open-source and independent. His pay package wasn’t disclosed, but a source said it was well under $1 billion.
Sign up for the Entrepreneur Daily newsletter to get the news and resources you need to know today to help you run your business better. Get it in your inbox.
It started as a weekend hobby in November. By February, the biggest AI labs in the world were battling to make him a full-time employee. Peter Steinberger, an Austrian coder who sold his last startup for over $100 million, built OpenClaw as a personal AI assistant that lets users communicate with AI agents through WhatsApp and iMessage. The platform can handle tasks like sending emails, debugging code, and making restaurant reservations.
OpenClaw went viral in late January when the AI assistants appeared to start communicating with each other on a Reddit-style forum called Moltbook. Suddenly, Steinberger was fielding meetings with OpenAI, Meta, and xAI during a whirlwind week in San Francisco.
OpenAI won.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
Steinberger says he chose them because they offered stronger guarantees that OpenClaw would remain open-source and independent. His pay package wasn’t disclosed, but a source said it was well under $1 billion.
Sign up for the Entrepreneur Daily newsletter to get the news and resources you need to know today to help you run your business better. Get it in your inbox.
