Who is Peter Steinberger? OpenAI hires ‘AI only’ social media platform Moltbook founder

OpenAI has hired OpenClaw founder and the man behind the viral AI social media app Peter Steinberger to lead the ‘next generation of personal agents’ at the company. Sam Altman announced the induction of Steinberger in a post on X, where he also noted that OpenClaw could continue to live as an open-source project supported by OpenAI.

“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 product offerings,” Altman announced.

“OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open-source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” he added.

Meanwhile, Steinberger also confirmed the development in a separate post, where he wrote, “I’m joining @OpenAI to bring agents to everyone. @OpenClaw is becoming a foundation: open, independent, and just getting started.”

What is OpenClaw? Why is it famous?

OpenClaw is an open-source framework that recently gained fame after the popularity of the AI-only social media platform Moltbook. The platform allows users to run autonomous AI agents on their machines and connect them to the apps that they already use like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Teams and more.

The platform has led to the complex technology being democratized while risks have also popped up about the potential misuse. For instance, X Product Head Nikita Bier had recently predicted that OpenClaw’s democratization of spammy bots will lead to emails, iMessages and phone calls becoming virtually unusable in the next three months.

Who is Peter Steinberger?

Before OpenClaw propelled him into the spotlight, Steinberger was best known as the founder and CEO of PSPDFKit, a cross-platform SDK that enables developers to integrate advanced PDF features such as viewing, annotations, editing, digital signatures, and document processing into apps across mobile and desktop.

He is widely credited with scaling the product without relying on venture capital and establishing it as a go-to solution for PDF workflows on mobile and web platforms.

In a social media post he later reshared, Steinberger noted that he had built 43 different projects before OpenClaw finally took off.

In a conversation with Peter Yang, Steinberger also admitted that after spending 13 years building PSPDFKit, he reached a point where he felt “lost”.