OpenAI acquired OpenClaw
That's it. Altman struck a deal with the Claw founder. And Zuckerberg decided to bet on Manus.
Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw's creator) is joining OpenAI to lead development of "the next generation of personal agents."
What happens to the OpenClaw project
OpenClaw will remain open — this was Peter's key requirement during negotiations. The project will continue as open-source under a foundation, and OpenAI will keep supporting it. Altman emphasized: "The future will be multi-agent, and it's important for us to support open-source as part of that."
This means the community and ecosystem around OpenClaw will be preserved — the same repository, the same features, the same license. The project will continue to develop independently, but now with OpenAI's financial and technical support.
What happens to the team
Peter Steinberger and several OpenClaw team members are moving to OpenAI. They will focus on personal AI agents, and Altman expects this to "quickly become a key part of the company's product offerings."
Altman called Peter "a genius with many amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to accomplish useful tasks." This deal signals OpenAI's serious ambitions in agentic AI systems capable of acting autonomously on behalf of users.
Deal context
Before this, both Meta and OpenAI made acquisition offers — both tech giants proposed billion-dollar valuations for a project that was losing $10–20K per month at the time. Mark Zuckerberg personally tested the product and discussed technical details, while OpenAI attracted with its computing power. In the end, Peter chose OpenAI, preserving the key condition — the project's openness.