OpenAI Acqui-Hires OpenClaw Creator in Billion-Dollar Bidding War With Meta
OpenAI confirmed the acqui-hire of Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind OpenClaw, the viral open-source personal agent that hit 198,000 GitHub stars in record time. Meta also bid. Both offered billions. Steinberger chose OpenAI. This single move redrew the competitive map of the agentic economy.
Sam Altman announced that Steinberger is joining OpenAI to “drive the next generation of personal agents.” OpenClaw will continue as an open-source project under a foundation model — the same Chromium-style approach Steinberger described in his Lex Fridman interview. Altman added: “We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.”
The bidding war was intense. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman made concrete offers. Zuckerberg reached out via WhatsApp, and the two reportedly spent time debating which AI model was superior. Altman’s pitch included a promise of computational power tied to OpenAI’s Cerebras partnership.
Steinberger, who was hemorrhaging $10,000 to $20,000 per month to run the project as an independent developer, chose OpenAI for its potential to accelerate the vision.
Why OpenClaw Is Not Just Another AI Tool
OpenClaw — formerly Clawdbot, then Moltbot after an Anthropic trademark complaint — is not a traditional coding agent or enterprise tool. It is a personal agent that operates through messaging apps: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and iMessage.
Users delegate real-world tasks through chat — managing calendars, booking flights, ordering food, handling email. It achieved viral adoption precisely because it works where people already are, in messaging threads, not in new apps.
Steinberger’s own prediction carries weight: OpenClaw-style agents will “kill 80% of apps” because “every app is just a very slow API now.” That prediction is now OpenAI’s corporate strategy.
What This Means for the AI Industry
Before this move, OpenAI’s architecture had a critical gap — no consumer messaging surface. ChatGPT is a destination app. OpenClaw is the opposite: it lives inside the apps people already use every day.
The acqui-hire gives OpenAI a credible path to controlling what may be the most important layer of the emerging agentic economy — the consumer surface where users express intent.
OpenAI now claims coverage across all four layers of the agent stack: execution (Codex), protocol (MCP adoption), enterprise (Codex App), and consumer (OpenClaw). Before February 15, only Anthropic had a presence at all four layers.
The Chromium Playbook at Scale
The deal follows a pattern that is becoming the dominant strategy in AI: open-source builds the community and adoption, then the company that acqui-hires the creator builds the premium product on top.
OpenAI is now executing this across two layers simultaneously — Codex CLI as an open-source execution layer and OpenClaw as an open-source consumer agent. This is a playbook, not an accident.
The next phase of AI competition will not be decided by who builds the smartest model. It will be decided by who controls where intent is expressed and where execution actually happens. OpenAI just made its move.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
