By Adam Clark

OpenAI has hired the founder of OpenClaw, the most successful independent artificial-intelligence project of the last few months. That could be good news for companies like Oracle, CoreWeave and Microsoft which need the AI startup's initial public offering to be a success.

Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, said he was joining OpenAI in a blog post over the weekend. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Steinberger would work on the next generation of "personal agents" -- AI which can take instructions and carry out multistep tasks for users.

"[Steinberger] 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," Altman said in a post on social-media platform X.

AI agents have long been seen as the next step in the sector after the huge success of chatbots and image and video-generation tools. Meanwhile, OpenAI is contending with the perception that it is losing its lead to rivals such as Anthropic, as both companies race toward IPO.

Anything that can strengthen OpenAI's position is good news for companies dependent on its spending such as cloud-computing providers Oracle and CoreWeave, as well as major OpenAI investors Microsoft and SoftBank Group. OpenAI is currently valued at around $500 billion and is reportedly in talks for a $100 billion fund-raising round ahead of an IPO as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.

For those who missed it, OpenClaw was launched in November but became a viral success earlier this year as users began to show off what it could do on social media. OpenClaw allows users to command and interact with personalized AI agents through messaging apps -- from iMessage and WhatsApp to Slack and Signal -- to perform real tasks.

The project hasn't come without its issues. Steinberger had to change the name from its original Clawdbot due to potential confusion with Anthropic's AI model Claude, first to Moltbot and finally to OpenClaw.

There have also been security concerns around the ability of OpenClaw to directly access users' data, which sparked a brief surge in the shares of cybersecurity company Cloudflare, whose technology can be used to make OpenClaw more secure.

Steinberger and Altman said OpenClaw would be moved into a foundation as an open-source project -- meaning users can modify it -- that OpenAI will continue to support.

"It will stay a place for thinkers, hackers and people that want a way to own their data, with the goal of supporting even more models and companies," Steinberger wrote in a post on his website.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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February 16, 2026 04:56 ET (09:56 GMT)

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