Who created OpenClaw? The story behind Clawdbot, Moltbot, and the Foundation
Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw as a side project in late 2025. The viral rise, the two renames, the OpenAI move, and who runs the project now.
OpenClaw was created by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer best known for founding PSPDFKit. He released it in November 2025 as a personal side project, watched it become one of the most-starred repositories on GitHub, and joined OpenAI in February 2026, saying the project would move to a foundation. The independent, non-profit OpenClaw Foundation was formally introduced in July 2026, and OpenClaw remains MIT-licensed and open source.
The person behind it
Peter Steinberger spent most of his career building developer tools: he founded PSPDFKit, the PDF framework used inside thousands of iOS and Android apps, and sold his stake years before the AI-agent wave. OpenClaw started as what he later called a “playground project”: he wanted an AI assistant that could actually do things on his own computer, without handing his data to a cloud service he didn’t control. That framing (your agent, your machine, your data) is still the clearest way to understand why OpenClaw works the way it does.
Three names in three months
The project’s naming history confuses a lot of people, so here it is plainly. The assistant launched on November 24, 2025 and went viral under the name Clawdbot, a nod to the “Clawd” assistant Steinberger had built earlier, itself a play on Anthropic’s Claude. That similarity is exactly what ended the name: after a trademark complaint from Anthropic, the project became Moltbot on January 27, 2026 (a lobster molting its shell). The new name lasted three days. On January 30, 2026 it was renamed again to OpenClaw, which Steinberger described as a stable reset: Moltbot “never quite rolled off the tongue.” If you find old tutorials mentioning Clawdbot or Moltbot, they’re describing the same software.
The OpenAI move, and who runs OpenClaw now
In mid-February 2026, Sam Altman announced that Steinberger was joining OpenAI to work on the next generation of personal agents. Two things about the arrangement matter for anyone deciding whether to build on OpenClaw. First, the project did not become OpenAI property: it moved to the OpenClaw Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit formally introduced on July 8, 2026, which employs the core team and signs the releases; the project’s README calls OpenAI “a donor, not an owner,” and the Foundation’s launch post says Steinberger “keeps making the calls.” Second, the license stayed MIT: the code remains free to use, modify, and self-host. Steinberger’s own explanation was characteristically direct: he wanted to “build an agent that even my mum can use,” and “teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.”
The hire had one concrete product consequence: in May 2026, OpenAI officially opened ChatGPT-subscription sign-in to OpenClaw, so a ChatGPT plan can power an OpenClaw agent directly. The details live in our ChatGPT-subscription guide.
Where the project stands today
In October 2026 the main repository has roughly 390,000 GitHub stars, the 2.0 release alone came from 933 contributors, and a new stable release ships every few days under the Foundation. Development happens in the open at github.com/openclaw/openclaw, in TypeScript, under the tagline “The AI that really does things. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way.” The growth has also attracted a crowd of lookalike documentation sites and SEO clones, so it’s worth knowing which OpenClaw sources are official before you follow an install guide.