OpenAI's OpenClaw hire sparks praise, memes, and rivalry chatter

• OpenAI hired the creator of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger.
• The news made waves in the AI community.
• Some AI leaders took to X to celebrate the news, and others expressed concern.

OpenAI announced on Sunday it had hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. Within hours, the news sent ripples across the AI community, drawing praise from some executives, jabs from rivals, and a flood of memes from engineers watching the talent wars unfold.

Steinberger wrote in a blog post shared on X Sunday that he was "joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman amplified the news, writing that "the future is going to be extremely multi-agent."

In response to the news, several OpenAI leaders welcomed Steinberger. Thibault Sottiaux, an engineering lead on OpenAI's Codex team, wrote that "@steipete is proof you can just build things."

Another Codex engineer posted that one of the "neat" parts of OpenAI's culture is how many former founders work there.

Steinberger told Lex Friedman in a podcast last week that both Mark Zuckerberg and Altman had made him offers.

OpenClaw and its agent-only social media network Moltbook became wildly popular earlier this year as developers and AI enthusiasts shared clips of autonomous AI agents posting, replying, and interacting online. The open-source project, which demonstrates how networks of AI agents can coordinate to perform tasks across apps, also rapidly gained traction on GitHub.

After Steinberger's announcement on Sunday, some of the people who worked on OpenClaw commented on the news.

"I know the decision was not an easy one, and I saw firsthand the pressure Peter was under, given that he understands how fundamental this could be for the AI timeline," Jamieson O'Reilly, an OpenClaw advisor, wrote on X in a post congratulating Steinberger.

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, said it was a sign "2026 was the year of the agents."

Not everyone in the tech space was as enthusiastic about the news.

XAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin asked users on X: "What's the best open alternative to OpenClaw right now? Doesn't make sense to put all your data into it if it's owned by OpenAI."

PayPal mafia member Jason Calacanis expressed similar concerns.

Steinberger and OpenAI have said that OpenClaw will remain an open-source project with OpenAI's support.

Other experts in the space pointed out that OpenAI's win could be a loss for Anthropic, especially after Steinberger wrote on X that Anthropic sent "love letters from legal."

"Another interesting detail is Anthropic's visible disdain for anything open source: their only contribution to this was legal threats," George Orosz, a tech industry analyst and author of the tech newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer, wrote on X.

Kris Puckett, a designer at Stripe, expressed a similar sentiment

Raphael Schaad, a visiting partner at Y Combinator, said, "I bet this causes lots of VC tears."

And finally, some X power users did what they do best: posted memes about the news.