Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, on X:

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.

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.

I really don’t think this is significant news — so much so that I contemplated not writing about it at all — but the outcry about this on Silicon Valley’s favorite social network has compelled me enough. The most interesting part of this debacle is that OpenClaw was initially built on top of Claude, and most people still use Anthropic’s models as the underlying technology behind their agents. That’s because Claude Opus 4.6 is widely regarded as the best large language model, especially due to its distinct speaking style, which sounds more human. GPT-5.2 Thinking is notoriously poor at standard chatting and isn’t OpenAI’s best coding model.

Anthropic, in the eyes of OpenClaw’s purveyors, “fumbled the biggest open-sourced AI project of all time,” according to one commenter. A right-wing agitator account commented, “ClosedClaw it is. End of an era.” These are humorous takes on the news, but I think they’re exaggerated. OpenClaw is not the future of anything, and acquiring its codebase doesn’t give OpenAI a competitive advantage toward building multi-purpose agents. I would even say OpenAI’s existing technology is more capable than OpenClaw — for one, OpenAI has a model that can use a browser autonomously. OpenClaw, by comparison, is a command-line utility that connects Claude (and other models) to other tools, like Telegram, Gmail, Slack, and other productivity apps.

Anthropic could easily replicate this, and probably in a much better way. Some could even assert that it already has. Claude Cowork, when enabled, sets up a virtual environment on a user’s computer that allows it to interact with files and services on that machine. It wouldn’t be hard for Anthropic to vibe-code an addition to Cowork that allows it to be controlled from the Claude smartphone app. Really what OpenAI acquired on Sunday was Steinberger himself, who probably isn’t a genius but certainly something similar. (I think Silicon Valley overuses the word “genius.”) Whatever contributions he makes to OpenAI may be significant, and I’m excited to see what’s in store.

Steinberger’s primary contribution is a slew of external tools OpenClaw can use to perform various tasks on the web. This is what separates it from a vanilla Claude Code installation — OpenClaw has many integrations, which people have found useful sometimes. Since OpenClaw’s virality, many more developers have written their own tools to interface with OpenClaw — these are all listed on a public directory cleverly named ClawHub. But if Anthropic — or OpenAI, for that matter — were to build a closed-source version of OpenClaw that integrates more tightly with their existing CLIs, I would imagine similar tools would spawn. This race is truly a free-for-all.

Whatever OpenClaw’s successor is, and whomever it may be written by (never write Anthropic off), the idea needs to be rethought. OpenClaw is an ingenious concept, but OpenAI owning that concept doesn’t make it any less impractical. What it will do is give Steinberger many more resources to rethink how agents should be built and the best use cases for LLMs. I just hope Altman’s hunger to capture Anthropic’s fire doesn’t precede Steinberger’s knack for exploration. Speaking of OpenClaw successors, Meta was also in talks with Steinberger to acquire his talent, but they fell apart. The result was Meta publishing a blatant copy of OpenClaw, called Manus, that hardly made it into the Top 10 list of Techmeme links on Tuesday. One of my least ambitious predictions is that Meta’s superintelligence team will go the way of the metaverse.