OpenAI ropes in OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger to lead personal agent push

OpenAI has roped in OpenClaw creator and software engineer Peter Steinberger to help drive the development of advanced personal artificial intelligence agents, Chief Executive Sam Altman said on 16 February, underscoring the company’s push toward systems that can autonomously collaborate to perform tasks for users.

“Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents,” Altman wrote in a post on X. He described Steinberger as “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.”

OpenAI did not disclose Steinberger’s exact role, start date or whether the initiative would involve new products or integrations with existing services such as ChatGPT.

Altman said such technology is expected to become central to OpenAI’s products. “We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings,” he wrote.

The move comes as major AI firms race to develop agentic systems, widely seen as the next frontier beyond chatbots.

Altman also said OpenAI would continue supporting OpenClaw, an open-source agent framework, but would place it under independent leadership.

“OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support,” he wrote.

He added that openness would remain important as agent ecosystems evolve. “The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that.”

Who Is Peter Steinberger? 

Before OpenClaw brought him into the AI spotlight, Steinberger was best known for building PSPDFKit, a cross-platform software development kit that helps developers integrate advanced PDF features — including editing, annotations and digital signatures — into apps.

He scaled that company without taking venture capital, slowly building it into a trusted solution for document workflows across web and mobile platforms. It wasn’t overnight success — it was steady, deliberate work.

In a reshared post, Steinberger revealed he had built 43 different projects before OpenClaw finally took off. In a conversation with Peter Yang, he admitted that after 13 years of building PSPDFKit, he reached a point where he felt “lost.”