OpenClaw Creator Gets Big Offers to Acquire AI Sensation—Will It Stay Open Source?

Peter Steinberger constructed crucial open-source AI agent very quickly. Now Meta and OpenAI are circling with acquisition provides, he stated final week, whereas crypto scammers turned his rebrand right into a 24-hour nightmare that just about made him give up.

OpenClaw (previously Clawdbot)—the self-modifying AI assistant that sparked MoltBook’s viral chaos and a whole ecosystem of autonomous brokers doing more and more bizarre and superb stuff on the web—hit 180,000 GitHub stars in document time.

The Austrian developer who “vibe coded” it into existence stated he’s now selecting between billion-dollar company buyouts and staying true to the open-source ethos that made it explode.

“My situations are that the venture stays open supply,” Steinberger informed Lex Fridman in a three-hour interview for his podcast. “Perhaps it is gonna be a mannequin like Chrome and Chromium. I believe that is too necessary to simply give to an organization and make it theirs.”

Each Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman have made concrete provides, Steinberger stated. Zuckerberg reached out through WhatsApp, and so they spent 10 minutes arguing about whether or not Claude Opus or GPT Codex was higher. Altman’s pitch got here with one thing extra tangible: A promise of computational energy tied to the Cerebras deal that might dramatically velocity up agent efficiency.

The venture is at present hemorrhaging $10,000 to $20,000 month-to-month, he stated. Steinberger routes all sponsorship cash to dependencies relatively than pocketing it. “Proper now I lose cash on this,” he stated matter-of-factly, like somebody who bought his earlier firm PSPDFKit and genuinely does not care in regards to the money.

What he does care about is the name-change saga that just about killed the entire thing. When Anthropic despatched a trademark criticism over “Clawdbot” being too near “Claude,” Steinberger renamed it to MoltBot.

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Then crypto scammers struck. Within the 5 seconds between urgent “rename” on two browser home windows, bots sniped his accounts. They served malware from his GitHub. They hijacked his NPM packages. His Twitter mentions grew to become unusable spam.

“I used to be near crying,” Steinberger admitted. “All the pieces’s fucked.”

He nearly deleted the venture totally. The second rebrand to OpenClaw required Manhattan Mission-level secrecy, decoy names, and coordinating account adjustments throughout platforms concurrently to keep away from one other crypto-scammer feeding frenzy. The assaults had been so subtle that Steinberger known as it “the worst type of on-line harassment I’ve skilled.”

Steinberger can be a fan of what Andrej Karpathy calls “agentic engineering”—a rejection of the time period “vibe coding,” which he considers a slur.

“I do agentic engineering, after which perhaps after 3:00 am, I change to vibe coding, after which I’ve regrets the following day,” he defined. He runs 4 to 10 brokers concurrently, racked up 6,600 commits in January alone, and constructed many of the codebase by speaking to AI relatively than typing. “These fingers are too treasured for writing now,” he stated.

Steinberger predicts that OpenClaw-style brokers will kill 80% of apps.

“Each app is only a very gradual API now, if they need it or not,” he informed Fridman.

Why pay for MyFitnessPal when your agent already is aware of your location, sleep patterns, and stress ranges? Why open Uber Eats when your assistant can order meals, schedule conferences, and handle your calendar proactively?

Steinberger’s program has opened the gates to tech world giants. He informed Fridman that he additionally held conversations with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The dev is now weighing beginning his personal firm with VC backing, however fears it could distract from constructing. He is thought of simply persevering with to bleed money and ignore the provides.

“I can not go fallacious,” he stated.