This Viral AI Project Went From Side Hustle to Coveted Prize in Three Months

Peter Steinberger, an Austrian coder and entrepreneur who hacked together OpenClaw as a side project in November, is set to join OpenAI. His creation will be managed through a separate foundation.

Representatives for Meta Platforms and xAI also held talks with Steinberger during a whirlwind week that he spent in San Francisco earlier in February, according to people familiar with the matter.

OpenClaw agents work as virtual personal assistants that can do tasks in the real world. Users communicate with agents through common messaging apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage. The agents then perform tasks such as sending emails and debugging code and even calling restaurants to make reservations.

Some technologists have suggested that OpenClaw could evolve into a kind of operating system allowing people to program their own personal assistants as more users turn to AI to help manage aspects of their lives.

The speed with which OpenClaw went viral and Steinberger became a hiring target for AI players was reminiscent of the earliest days of Apple’s App Store, where individual engineers built apps that quickly gained a wide following. The process minted near-instant millionaires and created the app economy. AI executives and researchers are also willing to bet on ideas such as OpenClaw that could emerge as a similar ecosystem.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars to license technology and hire researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers and entrepreneurs to build an AI superteam. That blitz raised pay packages for top AI employees across the industry.

Neither Steinberger nor OpenAI disclosed what his pay package would be. A person close to the deal said it was well under $1 billion.

After taking meetings with AI labs that allowed him to preview unreleased research, Steinberger chose OpenAI because the company gave him stronger guarantees that OpenClaw would remain independent, he said.

Steinberger released OpenClaw as an open-source project in November, meaning it is freely distributed and anyone can help create and modify it. In a blog post Saturday, he said he was working on making a foundation with “a proper structure” to keep OpenClaw open-source.

“Explicitly, our mission is to work with everyone and support everyone,” said Dave Morin, a venture investor who will be the foundation’s first independent board member. “That means all the people, all the labs, all the companies that want to play.”

Morin said they are still deciding who the other board members will be. But Steinberger will be on the board, as well as somebody from OpenAI, he said.

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said in an X post on Sunday that the company intends to continue to support OpenClaw as an open-source project, and reiterated that it would be managed through a foundation.

Altman also said Steinberger has “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.”

Steinberger will be joining the team responsible for OpenAI’s AI coding tool, called Codex, according to a spokeswoman for OpenAI. Steinberger often credits Codex as a tool he used to build OpenClaw.

It couldn’t be determined exactly what he will be working on while at OpenAI, but Altman’s X message and Steinberger’s blog post suggest he will be working on personal agents. Steinberger will also have time to continue working on OpenClaw, he said.

Steinberger started building OpenClaw last year as a weekend hobby project. He was semiretired after selling a startup for more than $100 million in 2021. Rapid development in the latest AI coding tools such as Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code drew him back to building, he said.

The assistants born out of his project have gone viral in the past few weeks for their ingenuity in completing tasks and communication. OpenClaw reached peak virality in late January, when the AI assistants appeared to begin communicating with each other on a Reddit-style forum called Moltbook.

Steinberger was soon overwhelmed with emails from users who were expecting a formalized customer-support team. “It’s just me,” he said.

Then, the AI labs came knocking.

Steinberger flew from Vienna to San Francisco shortly afterward. He stayed with friends while in the city because he preferred to, but also because most hotels were booked for the Super Bowl, he said.

Besides meeting with the AI labs, Steinberger spoke at a fireside chat and judged a Codex hackathon at OpenAI.

In the same week, he attended “ClawCon,” a grassroots event planned by OpenClaw users. Enthusiasts lined up outside a building, waiting to meet the “ClawFather.” Ashton Kutcher, the actor and venture-capital investor, made a surprise visit to ClawCon to meet Steinberger.

Steinberger left before the Super Bowl kicked off and recorded a conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman, he said.

Steinberger grew up on an Austrian farm and had been splitting his time between Vienna and London. He plans to relocate to San Francisco for the job, he said.

“Never would I have expected that my playground project would create such waves,” he wrote in the blog post Saturday. “The internet got weird again.”

Write to Angel Au-Yeung at angel.au-yeung@wsj.com