alt Hacker NewsI’m joining OpenAI
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This is NOT OpenAI buying OpenClaw, it's OpenAI hiring someone who can build it, similar to them betting on Jony Ive.
With OpenClaw we are seeing how the app layer becomes as important as the model layer.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
I really hope Mario who wrote the engine that powers OpenClaw[0] gets spoils as well.
OpenClaw is mostly a shell around this (ha!), and I've always been annoyed OpenClaw never credited those repos openly.
The pi agent repos are a joy to read, are 1/100th the size of OpenClaw, and have 95% of the functionality.
Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?
While following OpenClaw, I noticed an unexpected resentment in myself. After some introspection, I realized it’s tied to seeing a project achieve huge success while ignoring security norms many of us struggled to learn the hard way. On one level, it’s selfish discomfort at the feeling of being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”). On another level, it feels genuinely sad that the culture of enforcing security norms - work that has no direct personal reward and that end users will never consciously appreciate, but that only builders can uphold - seems to be on it’s way out
The amount of negative posts about this on twitter is crazy, I've not seen any positive posts. Jealousy or something else?
> The claw is the law.
This isn't a Slay The Spire reference is it?
I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him.
There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.
It’s not like Anthropic or OpenAI were not working on “AI assistants” before OpenClaw, it’s pretty much the endgame as I can see it. This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else. Although that’s impressive, I don’t see more than an acquisition of the hype by OpenAI.
It's strange how quickly this project got so big... It did not seem like anything particularly novel to me.
This is how you sell your SOUL.md
Enjoy the billions Peter, moving on to something that’s not run by Suits and Corporate policies.
Innocent people are going to get hurt. Not sure how yet, but, giving a company intimate details about your life never ends well.
So that’s OpenClaw dead then.
It took all of Peter’s time to move it forward, even with maintainers (who he complained got immediately hired by AI companies).
Now he’s gonna be working on other stuff at OpenAI, so OpenClaw will be dead real quick.
Also I was following him for his AI coding experience even before the whole OpenClaw thing, he’ll likely stop posting about his experiences working with AI as well
Congrats to Peter!
Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?
I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?
> "What I want is to change the world".
I don't know if you'll achieve that at OpenAI or if it'll even be a good change for the world, but I genuinely wish you the best. Regardless of the news around OpenAI I still think it's great that a personal project got you a position at a company like that.
Is an agent running on a desktop, with access to excel, word, email and slack going to replace Saas?
Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes
This could be the most disruptive software we have seen
It‘s just crazy to me that this guy lives around the corner. That should inspire some hope for me I guess, that even people from Vienna can be successful on such a level.
Unclear what this truly means for the open version.
We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.
Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?
(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)
The guy already sold his previous company for a shitload of money. Got bored and did a side project that stirred the Internet on the past month. That is way more than most people here are going to accomplish in a lifetime. Yet, he has some deal with OpenAI to work on whatever he things exciting. I don't see why so much negative comments here other than jelously
I really hope Mario and Armin also gets poached
The real gem inside OpenClaw is pi, the agent, created by Mario Zechner. Pi is by far the best agent framework in the world. Most extensible, with the best primitives. .
Armin Ronacher , creator of flask , can go deep and make something like openclaw enterprise ready.
The value of Peter is in connecting the dots, thinking from users perspective, and bringing business perspective
The trio are friends and have together vibecoded vibetunnel.
Sam Altman, if you are reading this , get Mario and Armin today.
Truly incredible.
OpenAI is putting money where their mouth is: a one-man team can create a vibe-coded project, and score big.
Open-source, and hyped incredibly well.
Interesting times ahead as everyone else chases this new get-rich-quick scheme. Will be plentiful for the shovel makers.
> I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone.
Sounds like a threat - "I'm joining OpenSkynetAI to bring AI agents onto your harddisc too!"
Potentially amazing opportunity for OpenAI to more meaningfully compete with Claude Code at the developer and hobbyist level. Based on vibes it sure seemed like Claude Code / Opus 4.6 was running away with developer mindshare.
Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.
Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.
Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)
It's kind of a shame actually, because the whole promise of OpenClaw is that you own all the data yourself, you have complete control, you can write the memories or the personality of the bot. "Open"AI will never run ChatGPT this way. They want all of your data, your documents, your calendar, they want to keep it for themselves and lock you into their platform. They will want a sanitised corporate friendly version of an AI agent that reflects well on their brand.
All they have to do now is partner with one of the major messaging providers like telegram and they can offer this as a hosted bot solution and probably dominate the market. Yes people are going out there buying mac minis and enjoying setting it up themselves but 90% of the general public don't want to do or maintain that and still want the benefits of all of it.
Openclaw did what no major model producer would do. Release insanly insecure software that can do whatever it wants on your machine.
If openai had done it themselves, immediate backlash.
For anyone looking at alternatives in this space - I built Gobii (https://gobii.ai) 8 months before OpenClaw existed. MIT licensed, cloud native, gVisor sandboxed.
The sandboxing part matters more than people think. Giving an LLM a browser with full network access and no isolation is a real security problem that most projects in this space hand-wave away.
Multi-provider LLM support (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, open-weight models via vLLM). In production with paying customers.
Happy to answer architecture questions.
It's pretty depressing yet motivating seeing SWE bifurcate.
This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.
With AI, it's one person who builds and takes everything.
Hugged to death?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....
Just like the original OpenAI story, this seems like a case of reputation hacking through asymmetry in risk tolerance.
There is not much novel about OpenClaw. Anybody could have thought of this or done it. The reason people have not released an agent that would run by itself, edit its own code and be exposed to the internet is not that it's hard or novel - it's because it is an utterly reckless thing to do. No responsible corporate entity could afford to do it. So we needed someone with little enough to lose, enough skill and willing to be reckless enough to do it and release it openly to let everyone else absorb the risk.
I think he's smart to jump on the job opportunity here because it may well turn out that this goes south in a big way very fast.
Not sure if anyone has heard his interview on the Hard Fork podcast... was not unlike listening to a PR automaton. Now going to work for OpenAI. Yup.
Going to short OpenAI after hearing this.
This is how you can tell OpenAI is panicking, rather than build something fairly simple themselves, they insta bought it for the headline news/"hype"...
Not surprising if you've been paying attention on Twitter, but interesting to see nonetheless.
> That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.
You work for OpenAI now. You don't have to worry about safety anymore.
Congrats — just the beginning for agents!
When I hear people talking about how insecure OpenClaw is, I remember how insecure the internet was in the early days. Sometimes it's about doing the right thing badly and fix the bad things after.
Big Tech can't release software this dangerous and then figure out how to make it secure. For them it would be an absolute disaster and could ruin them.
What OpenClaw did was show us the future, give us a taste of what it would be like and had the balls to do it badly.
Technology is often pushed forwards by ostensively bad ideas (like telnet) that carve a path through the jungle and let other people create roads after.
I don't get the hate towards OpenClaw, if it was a consumer product I would, but for hackers to play around to see what is possible it's an amazing (and ridiculously simple) idea. Much like http was.
If you connected to your bank account via telnet in the 1980s or plain http in the 90s or stored your secrets in 'crypt' well, you deserved what you got ;-) But that's how many great things get started, badly, we see the flaws fix them and we get the safe version.
And that I guess is what he'll get to do now.
* OpenClaw is a straw man for AGI *
Disappointing TBH. I completely understand that the OpenAI offer was likely too good to pass up, and I would have done the same in his position, but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw. The position he is about to enter requires skills in politics and bureaucracy, not engineering and design.
Those attempting to discredit the value of OpenClaw by virtue of it being easily replicable or simple are missing the point. This was, like most successful entrepreneurial endeavours, a distribution play.
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
Best way to democratize AI is to keep it as free or as inexpensive as possible.
Time to uninstall
I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing I have to work for Sam Altman. Dude’s gross.
I appreciate the author’s work and he seems like a good guy.
In spite of that, it’s incredibly obvious OpenClaw was pushed by bots across pretty much every social media platform and that’s weird and unsettling.
Well, someone has to backfill Zoë Hitzig exiting.
congrats @steipete!
There are a few take aways I think the detractors and celebrators here are missing.
1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while having AI do all the work for you." This buy out for something vibe coded and built around another open source project is meant to keep the hype going. The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worried about being directly liable for all the harms OpenClaw can do.
2. Any pretense for AI Safety concerns that had been coming from OpenAI really fall flat with this move. We've seen multiple hacks, scams, and misaligned AI action from this project that has only been used in the wild for a few months.
3. We've yet to see any moats in the AI space and this scares the big players. Models are neck and neck with one another and open source models are not too far behind. Claude Code is great, but so is OpenCode. Now Peter used AI to program an free app for AI agents.
LLMs and AI are going to be as disruptive as Web 1 and this is OpenAI's attempt to take more control. They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released. If he can build things like this what's stopping everyone else? Better to control the most popular one than try to squash it. This is a powerful new technology and immense amounts of wealth are trying to control it, but it is so disruptive they might not be able to. It's so important to have good open source options so we can create a new Web 1.0 and not let it be made into Web 2.0