Sam Altman Snags Viral OpenClaw Creator as OpenAI Pushes "AI Agents" to the Front Lines

Everyone: “Okay sure, OpenAI bought Jony Ive’s startup for $6B… but at some point they have to chill, right?”

Sam Altman: “Hold. My. GPU.”

HOLY SH*T! The creator of viral AI agent OpenClaw, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, is officially joining OpenAI. And according to Altman, OpenClaw will “live in a foundation” inside the company as an open-source project that OpenAI will continue to support. Translation? The agent wars are about to get crazy.

(Source: Reuters)

If you haven’t seen it on your Twitter timeline, AI agents are the new hotness. Not chatbots. Not image generators. Agents. The kind that can manage your inbox, book your flights, click through websites, fill out forms, check your email and essentially do all of the annoying tasks Michael Scott had Pam Beasley doing in The Office. Well, sorry Pammy, you just got replaced.

OpenClaw (RIP Clawdbot and Moltbot… gone but not forgotten) went from “random open-source project” to “every AI bro’s new personality trait” in about 30 days. Businesses and power users latched onto it because it can autonomously complete tasks, make decisions, and take action without its user hovering over the way a Tesla employee hovers over the emergency button in the robotaxi.

I guess Sam believes in the hype as well. He called Steinberger “a genius” and said he’s joining to “drive the next generation of personal agents.” He also added that this will “quickly become core to our product offerings.” Clearly, the former startup investor turned AI king “can’t stop, won’t stop” until Elon is on his knees begging for mercy.

This comes as OpenAI, recently valued around $500 billion and very much trying to make that number look cheap, continues to open the checkbook for talent. Back in May, it dropped over $6 billion to acquire Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io. Meanwhile, Meta and Google are still in the phase of paying NBA contracts to the top researchers. That said, while he might not have to worry about Grok overtaking him anytime soon, Sam does have one enemy he needs to be aware of. Anthropic.

Claude has been making serious inroads with enterprise customers… especially with Claude Code and its freshly launched Claude Opus 4.6, which the company claims is better at coding, handling longer task chains, and producing actual professional-grade work without falling apart halfway through. And they’re not exactly underfunded. Anthropic just closed a round valuing it at $380 billion. So yeah. This isn’t a walk in the park.

OpenClaw has also spread quickly in China, where it can be paired with local language models like DeepSeek and integrated into Chinese messaging apps through custom setups. Baidu even plans to give users of its main smartphone app direct access to it. That global adoption? Probably not lost on OpenAI.

Of course, not everyone is cheering. Some researchers are uneasy about how open OpenClaw is. When you let users tweak an autonomous agent “in just about any way they see fit,” you’re also handing cyberthreats a brand new toy.

But that’s kind of the moment we’re in. The AI race has officially moved beyond “who has the best chatbot” to “who controls the digital workers of the future.” And Sam Altman just added another BIGLY chess piece to the board.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Tesla, Meta, and Google as mentioned in the article.