OpenClaw creator joins OpenAI instead of Anthropic
The internet is calling this a "generational fumble."
Peter Steinberger, the guy who built the viral “OpenClaw” agent, has officially joined OpenAI.
This tool was originally built to show off how great Anthropic’s Claude model is. It was arguably the best free marketing Anthropic has had in ages — a project that racked up 180,000 GitHub stars in mere days. But instead of hiring the guy or partnering with him, they freakin’ pushed him right into the arms of their biggest competitor.
Let’s revisit what just happened over the past several months.
In November 2025, Peter released “Clawdbot.”
It started as a 1-hour prototype he built just because he was “annoyed it didn’t exist”. It was an AI agent that did things on your computer — managing calendars, booking things, even checking emails — and people loved it. He named it “Clawdbot” and gave it a lobster mascot as a nod to Anthropic’s mascot, Claude.
Instead of sending him a high-five, Anthropic sent him a trademark notice. To be fair, Peter said they were “really nice” about it and admitted the email was polite. But it still forced him to scramble and rename the project to “Moltbot” and then “OpenClaw.”
During that chaos, scammers even hijacked the old name to push fake crypto coins, stressing Peter out big time. He talked about how, in the 10-second window between renames, bad actors grabbed the repo name and launched malware and meme coins.
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