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Peter Steinberger

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Peter Steinberger is an Austrian software engineer and entrepreneur, known as the founder of the PDF software company PSPDFKit (renamed Nutrient in 2024) and as the creator of OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent he started in November 2025 as a WhatsApp relay, later named Clawd, then Clawdbot and then Moltbot [1][13][14]. OpenClaw spread rapidly in January 2026, and on 14 February 2026 Steinberger announced that he was joining OpenAI "to work on bringing agents to everyone", adding that OpenClaw "will move to a foundation and stay open and independent" [2]. The OpenClaw Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, launched on 8 July 2026 with Steinberger as co-author of its announcement; the Foundation says he continues to make the project's technical calls and leads Claw Labs, a team inside OpenAI [35]. He uses the handle steipete on his blog, GitHub and X [1][42].

NationalityAustrian [3]
EducationStudied software engineering at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), per Fortune [3]
Known forFounding PSPDFKit (now Nutrient); creating OpenClaw [1]
EmployerOpenAI (since February 2026) [2][20]
Role at OpenAILeads Claw Labs, per the OpenClaw Foundation [35]
Residence (September 2026)San Francisco, per his website [1]
Online handlesteipete [1][42]

Expanded article table

Early life and education

Fortune reported in February 2026 that Steinberger was born and raised in rural Austria and became interested in computers at 14, when a summer guest introduced him to a PC [3]. According to the same profile, he studied software engineering at the Vienna University of Technology, worked as a senior iOS engineer in Silicon Valley before founding his company, and taught mobile development at his alma mater [3]. He has said little in public about his personal life; the Fortune profile notes that he is a Doctor Who fan, and he told podcaster Lex Fridman that OpenClaw's original mascot was a lobster in a TARDIS for that reason [3][9].

PSPDFKit

According to TechCrunch, PSPDFKit "started out around 2011 as a framework and toolset created by Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger", who was active in the iOS developer community and saw demand for document features such as viewing, editing and e-signing inside apps [4]. The name combined his initials (PS) with PDF and "kit", a reference to the software development kit it was sold as [4]. Fortune, citing his interview with Fridman, says he started the product in 2011 while waiting six months for a U.S. work visa, working on PDF rendering on the iPad [3]. Martin Schürrer joined him in building the framework, and Jonathan Rhyne, a U.S. attorney who had represented the pair, came on as a third co-founder by 2014 and was CEO by 2021; Steinberger and Schürrer were based in Vienna and Rhyne in North Carolina [4].

The company grew without outside capital for about a decade. On 1 October 2021 it announced its first outside investment: more than €100 million (about $116 million) from Insight Partners, with Insight's Ryan Hinkle joining the board [4][5]. At that point PSPDFKit said nearly a billion end users in over 150 countries relied on apps built on its platform, and it listed customers including Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM and Volkswagen [5]. The announcement stated that "PSPDFKit co-founders Peter Steinberger and Martin Schürrer are stepping back from their full-time active roles in the business" while remaining "significantly invested", and Rhyne stayed on as CEO [5][4].

Steinberger later described the deal as the sale of his shares. "When I sold my shares of PSPDFKit after building the company and making it my identity for over 13 years, I was very broken," he wrote in 2025, adding that Insight had "acquired the majority" [7]. His website describes the outcome as a "nine-figure exit" [1]. After the investment, PSPDFKit bought document-processing technology from ORPALIS, Aquaforest and Muhimbi and the workflow platform Integrify, and on 23 October 2024 it rebranded as Nutrient [6].

Burnout and return to programming

Steinberger has said that what wore him down at PSPDFKit was mostly "people stuff": conflicts with co-founders and high-pressure situations with customers, rather than the programming itself [9]. He told Fridman that after leaving he felt drained of his "mojo": "I couldn't get code out anymore. I was just, like, staring and feeling empty" [9]. He booked a one-way trip to Madrid to "catch up on life" [9]. In a June 2025 post titled "Finding My Spark Again", he wrote that he had "partied hard", done therapy and moved to another country while searching for meaning, before concluding: "You don't find purpose. You create it." [7]

What drew him back was AI-assisted programming. He told Fridman that his first contact with Claude Code came "in April" (Fortune dates the renewed spark to April 2025), that he then experimented with Cursor, and that he returned to Claude Code as his main tool, at one point running "seven subscriptions" [9][3]. His GitHub bio reads: "Came back from retirement to mess with AI." [42]

Tools and writing, 2025

From June 2025 he blogged frequently about what he called agentic engineering and released a string of small open-source developer tools, mostly for macOS and for managing coding agents [10]:

Project or postDateDescription (from his blog)
"Claude Code is My Computer"3 June 2025Running Claude Code with the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag and full system access [10]
Vibe Meter4 June 2025macOS menu bar app for tracking AI spending [10]
Peekaboo7 June 2025 (2.0 on 2 July)Screenshot tool for AI agents, first as an MCP server, then CLI-first [10]
VibeTunnel16 June 2025Browser-based terminal controller for checking on agents remotely [10]
Poltergeist5 August 2025"AI-friendly" universal build watcher [10]
Claude Code Anonymous9 September 2025A meetup format for developers, later renamed Agents Anonymous [10][9]
OracleLate 2025CLI that lets an agent query GPT-5 Pro when stuck [12]
CodexBarNovember 2025Menu bar app showing usage stats for Codex and Claude Code; a May 2026 update appears in his token-bill screenshot [43][30]

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He also wrote about the Model Context Protocol ("MCP Best Practices", June 2025) and, in "Just One More Prompt" (August 2025), called himself "a Claudoholic" in a reflection on compulsive AI use [10].

Views on agentic coding

By October 2025 Steinberger had switched from Claude Code to OpenAI's Codex. In "Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering" (14 October 2025) he wrote that "Agentic engineering has become so good that it now writes pretty much 100% of my code", that he had "completely moved to codex cli as daily driver", and that he ran "between 3-8 in parallel in a 3x3 terminal grid", building "pretty much everything with gpt-5-codex on mid settings" [11]. The same post criticized Claude Code's tone and performance at the time [11]. In "Shipping at Inference-Speed" (28 December 2025) he wrote that "The real unlock into building like a factory was GPT 5" and that "most code I don't read", explaining that he watches the output stream and checks key parts while keeping the overall architecture in his head [12]. He named TypeScript, Go and Swift as his default languages and compared Codex, which he said reads much more code before editing, with Anthropic's Opus models, which he called "much more eager" [12].

He has pushed back on the label vibe coding. On the first episode of OpenAI's Builders Unscripted podcast in February 2026 he said "I think vibe coding is a slur", arguing that people try AI tools without understanding "that it's a skill", which he compared to learning the guitar [25]. He calls pull requests from people who have never programmed "prompt requests" and has said he welcomes them as a first step into open source [9].

OpenClaw

Origin

Steinberger told Fridman that he had experimented with a WhatsApp-connected assistant earlier in 2025, set it aside because he expected the big labs to build one, and returned to it in November because nobody had: "I was annoyed that it didn't exist, so I just prompted it into existence." [9] The first version hooked WhatsApp up to Claude Code's command-line interface; he said he built it "in one hour" [9]. In an OpenAI podcast he said it "clicked" during a weekend trip to Marrakesh, where the internet was poor but WhatsApp worked [25]. The project's own history says it started as "WhatsApp Relay" and that "Clawd was born in November 2025 - a playful pun on 'Claude' with a claw" [14]. The GitHub repository now at openclaw/openclaw was created on 24 November 2025 [13].

Renames

As the project took off in January 2026 under the name Clawdbot, Anthropic raised trademark concerns. Steinberger described the first contact as a friendly email from an Anthropic employee, followed by a second message saying the lawyers were getting uneasy [9]; OpenClaw's history says "Anthropic's legal team politely asked us to reconsider. Fair enough." [14] The project became Moltbot on 27 January 2026, a name picked in what Steinberger called "a chaotic 5am Discord brainstorm" [15][14].

The switch went badly. Steinberger told Fridman that crypto speculators grabbed the old account names within seconds of his renames: "in those five seconds, they stole the account name" [9]. He said a hijacked old account was used to promote tokens and serve malware, that he mistakenly renamed his personal GitHub account and lost it briefly, and that the npm package was also taken, before friends at X and GitHub helped undo the damage [9]. Malwarebytes documented typosquatted domains and a cloned repository impersonating Moltbot and Steinberger within days [16]. He said he came close to deleting the project ("I did show you the future, you build it") and that he was "close to crying" [9].

After sleeping on it, he chose OpenClaw [9]. The rename was announced in a blog post dated 29 January 2026, which said "trademark searches came back clear" and that the project had passed 100,000 GitHub stars and drawn 2 million visitors in a single week [14].

Viral growth, Moltbook and security

By 2 February 2026 CNBC counted more than 145,000 GitHub stars and 20,000 forks [17]. Buzz around the project was also fueled by Moltbook, a Reddit-style social network for AI agents launched in January by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, not by Steinberger [17]. Steinberger called Moltbook "art" and "the finest slop", credited Schlicht for building it quickly, and said people had written to him demanding he shut it down, although anyone could have built such a site [9]. Meta acquired Moltbook in March 2026, bringing Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs [19].

Security researchers were critical. CNBC reported that Palo Alto Networks warned of a "lethal trifecta" of access to private data, exposure to untrusted content and the ability to communicate externally [17]. Steinberger told CNBC by email: "It's a free, open source hobby project that requires careful configuration to be secure. It's not meant for non-technical users." [17] On 7 February 2026 he co-announced a partnership under which every skill published to ClawHub, the project's skill registry, is scanned with VirusTotal, while stating that this was "not a silver bullet" against prompt injection [18]. He later wrote that between 10 January and 30 April 2026 the project received 1,309 GitHub security advisories, of which 535 were published and 746 closed as invalid [28].

Joining OpenAI

Steinberger told Fridman, in an episode published on 11 February 2026, that "every big VC company" was in his inbox and that of the major labs he had talked to, Meta and OpenAI seemed most interesting [8][9]. He described Mark Zuckerberg messaging him on WhatsApp and the two arguing for ten minutes over whether Claude Code or Codex was better [9]. His condition for either company, he said, was that the project stay open source, perhaps on "a model like Chrome and Chromium" [9]. He also said he was losing money on OpenClaw, "something between 10 and 20K a month", because sponsorship income went to his dependencies [9].

On 14 February 2026 he published "OpenClaw, OpenAI and the future" [2]. "I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot," he wrote. "What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone." [2] He said OpenAI "has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project", and that he was working on making OpenClaw a foundation [2]. His stated next mission was "to build an agent that even my mum can use" [2].

The next day Sam Altman wrote on X that Steinberger was "joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents", calling him "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", and said OpenClaw would "live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support" [20]. No terms were disclosed [21]. TechCrunch and CNBC reported the hire on 15 February [22][21].

The move drew commentary in Austria about Europe losing talent. Replying on X on 17 February, Steinberger wrote in German that most people in the U.S. are enthusiastic while in Europe he gets insulted with shouts of "REGULATION and RESPONSIBILITY", and that at OpenAI most people work six to seven days a week and are paid accordingly, which he said would be illegal at home [23][24]. Fortune reported that he was moving to the United States [3]; as of September 2026 his website says he lives in San Francisco [1].

Work at OpenAI and on OpenClaw

Steinberger has continued to lead OpenClaw while employed by OpenAI. The OpenClaw Foundation's launch post says OpenAI "stood up Claw Labs, a team inside OpenAI led by Peter that works on shared product improvements", and that "Peter built this thing, and Peter keeps making the calls, especially the technical ones" [35].

Token spending

On 15 May 2026 Steinberger posted a screenshot of his CodexBar usage tracker showing $1,305,088.81 of OpenAI API spend over 30 days, 603 billion tokens, 7.6 million requests and a top model of gpt-5.5-2026-04-23 (GPT-5.5) [30]. Tom's Hardware and The Next Web reported that the spend came from roughly 100 Codex instances run by a three-person team on OpenClaw, reviewing pull requests, scanning commits for vulnerabilities, deduplicating issues and writing fixes, with OpenAI covering the cost [31][32]. In a reply he said that he could disable Codex's fast mode and "it's 70% cheaper. So it's more like one employee." [44]

Releases, security and stability

In April 2026 he wrote that OpenClaw had moved from a project where "Releases used to be just me" to one where each release is handled by him and another Foundation employee, with more functionality moved into plugins to shrink the attack surface [28]. After problems with the 2026.4.24 and 2026.4.29 releases he apologized in a post titled "OpenClaw Had a Rough Week", writing that "OpenClaw was still too founder-driven" and that too much release, review and support work had sat with him [29]. A follow-up on 28 May reported faster agent turns and a 59% smaller published package [33].

He was quoted in NVIDIA's 16 March 2026 announcement of NemoClaw, which installs OpenClaw together with NVIDIA OpenShell: "With NVIDIA and the broader ecosystem, we're building the claws and guardrails that let anyone create powerful, secure AI assistants." [26]

The Foundation

The OpenClaw Foundation was introduced on 8 July 2026 in a post signed by Dave Morin and Steinberger, describing a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a full-time staff, OpenAI as a major donor, and partners including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Red Hat and Tencent [35]. Steinberger added on X: "OpenAI hired me, not OpenClaw. The OpenClaw Foundation is independent, with sponsors rather than owners" [36]. The openclaw.ai homepage states: "OpenAI is a donor and Peter Steinberger works there; OpenClaw is not an OpenAI product." [39] Critics questioned that neutrality. In Computerworld, consultant Noah Kenney argued that "The 'neutral steward's' chief technical decision maker is employed by one of the competing labs it is supposed to be neutral with." [37]

On 29 September 2026 the Foundation announced OpenClaw Enterprise, a control plane for persistent agents that "originally started at OpenAI and then was donated to the OpenClaw Foundation"; the announcement was written by Kevin Lin, whom Red Hat describes as leading OpenClaw Enterprise efforts at OpenAI [40][41].

Public appearances

Steinberger gave a TED talk, "How I created OpenClaw, the breakthrough AI agent", at TED2026 in April 2026 [27]. Y Combinator announced him as a speaker at its Startup School 2026 [34]. On 12 August 2026 he took community questions on The ClawCast, the OpenClaw Foundation's podcast [38].

Timeline

DateEvent
c. 2011Starts PSPDFKit as an iOS PDF framework [4]
1 October 2021Insight Partners invests more than €100 million in PSPDFKit; Steinberger steps back from a full-time role [5]
1 June 2025Publishes "Finding My Spark Again" about returning to programming [7]
14 October 2025"Just Talk To It" describes a Codex-based workflow [11]
24 November 2025OpenClaw's GitHub repository is created [13]
27 January 2026Clawdbot renamed Moltbot after Anthropic's trademark request [15]
29 January 2026Moltbot renamed OpenClaw [14]
7 February 2026ClawHub skills scanned with VirusTotal [18]
11 February 2026Lex Fridman Podcast #491 published [8]
14-15 February 2026Announces he is joining OpenAI; Altman confirms [2][20]
16 March 2026Quoted in NVIDIA's NemoClaw announcement [26]
April 2026TED2026 talk [27]
15 May 2026Posts $1.3 million 30-day OpenAI API bill [30]
8 July 2026OpenClaw Foundation launches [35]
29 September 2026OpenClaw Enterprise announced by the Foundation [40]

Expanded article table

References

  1. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7About - Peter Steinberger (steipete.me)
  2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7OpenClaw, OpenAI and the future - Peter Steinberger (14 February 2026)
  3. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Who is OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger? The millennial developer caught the attention of Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg - Fortune (Eva Roytburg, 19 February 2026)
  4. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6PSPDFkit raises $116M, its first outside money; now nearly 1B people use apps powered by its collaboration, signing and markup tools - TechCrunch via Yahoo Finance (Ingrid Lunden, 1 October 2021)
  5. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4PSPDFKit Announces €100 Million Strategic Investment From Insight Partners to Fuel Growth - Insight Partners (1 October 2021)
  6. ^PSPDFKit rebrands as Nutrient after tripling revenue since strategic investment from Insight Partners in 2021 - PR Newswire (23 October 2024)
  7. ^1 ^2 ^3Finding My Spark Again - Peter Steinberger (1 June 2025)
  8. ^1 ^2#491 - OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger - Lex Fridman Podcast (11 February 2026)
  9. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13 ^14 ^15 ^16 ^17 ^18 ^19Transcript for OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger - Lex Fridman Podcast #491
  10. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8All Posts - Peter Steinberger (steipete.me)
  11. ^1 ^2 ^3Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering - Peter Steinberger (14 October 2025)
  12. ^1 ^2 ^3Shipping at Inference-Speed - Peter Steinberger (28 December 2025)
  13. ^1 ^2 ^3openclaw/openclaw - GitHub
  14. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6Introducing OpenClaw - OpenClaw Blog (Peter Steinberger, 29 January 2026)
  15. ^1 ^2Clawdbot Rebrands to Moltbot After Trademark Request From Anthropic - Laravel News (Eric L. Barnes, 27 January 2026)
  16. ^Clawdbot's rename to Moltbot sparks impersonation campaign - Malwarebytes (Stefan Dasic, 29 January 2026)
  17. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4From Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw: Meet the AI agent generating buzz and fear globally - CNBC (Dylan Butts and Matthew Chin, 2 February 2026)
  18. ^1 ^2OpenClaw Partners with VirusTotal for Skill Security - OpenClaw Blog (Peter Steinberger, Jamieson O'Reilly and Bernardo Quintero, 7 February 2026)
  19. ^Meta acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake posts - TechCrunch (Amanda Silberling, 10 March 2026)
  20. ^1 ^2 ^3Post by Sam Altman (@sama) on X (15 February 2026)
  21. ^1 ^2OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI, Altman says - CNBC (Ashley Capoot and Ari Levy, 15 February 2026)
  22. ^OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI - TechCrunch (Anthony Ha, 15 February 2026)
  23. ^Post by Peter Steinberger (@steipete) on X (17 February 2026, in German)
  24. ^"In Europe, I get Insulted": OpenClaw Creator Peter Steinberger On Why He Joined OpenAI - Trending Topics (Jakob Steinschaden, 18 February 2026)
  25. ^1 ^2OpenClaw creator's advice to AI builders is to be more playful and allow yourself time to improve - TechCrunch (Sarah Perez, 25 February 2026)
  26. ^1 ^2NVIDIA Announces NemoClaw for the OpenClaw Community - NVIDIA Newsroom (16 March 2026)
  27. ^1 ^2Peter Steinberger: How I created OpenClaw, the breakthrough AI agent - TED (TED2026, April 2026)
  28. ^1 ^2How OpenClaw Got Safer in Public - OpenClaw Blog (Peter Steinberger, 30 April 2026)
  29. ^OpenClaw Had a Rough Week - OpenClaw Blog (Peter Steinberger, 5 May 2026)
  30. ^1 ^2 ^3Post by Peter Steinberger (@steipete) on X, with CodexBar screenshot and replies (15 May 2026)
  31. ^OpenClaw creator burned through $1.3 million in OpenAI API tokens in a single month - Tom's Hardware (Luke James, 17 May 2026)
  32. ^OpenClaw creator's $1.3 million monthly OpenAI bill reveals the real cost of autonomous AI coding at scale - The Next Web (18 May 2026)
  33. ^OpenClaw Is Getting Faster, Smaller, and Easier to Trust - OpenClaw Blog (Peter Steinberger, 28 May 2026)
  34. ^Post by Y Combinator (@ycombinator) on X (5 June 2026)
  35. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Introducing the OpenClaw Foundation - OpenClaw Blog (Dave Morin and Peter Steinberger, 8 July 2026)
  36. ^Post by Peter Steinberger (@steipete) on X (9 July 2026 UTC)
  37. ^OpenClaw becomes a nonprofit foundation as it seeks to be 'the Switzerland of AI' - Computerworld (Evan Schuman, 13 July 2026)
  38. ^The ClawCast: Unfiltered Q&A with OpenClaw Founder Peter Steinberger - OpenClaw (12 August 2026)
  39. ^OpenClaw - Open-Source AI Assistant (openclaw.ai homepage)
  40. ^1 ^2OpenClaw Enterprise - The Open Agent Platform - OpenClaw Blog (Kevin Lin, 29 September 2026)
  41. ^Why Red Hat is building an open foundation for enterprise agents with OpenClaw Enterprise - Red Hat Blog (Joe Fernandes, 29 September 2026)
  42. ^1 ^2 ^3steipete - GitHub profile
  43. ^steipete/CodexBar - GitHub
  44. ^Reply by Peter Steinberger (@steipete) on X (15 May 2026)

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Cite this page: AI Wiki. "Peter Steinberger." aiwiki.ai, updated 30 Sept 2026, fact-checked 30 Sept 2026. CC BY 4.0. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/peter_steinberger

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