Peter Steinberger
Peter Steinberger is an Austrian software entrepreneur and the creator of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent framework that bridges mobile messaging platforms (WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, and others) to desktop AI agents such as Claude Code. He previously founded PSPDFKit, a PDF management platform deployed on over one billion devices, which was acquired for approximately €100 million in 2023. He built OpenClaw after noticing he could not use Claude Code while away from his desk, and the project became one of the fastest-growing open-source AI repositories, reaching 200,000+ GitHub stars within roughly three months of launch. In February 2026, Steinberger joined OpenAI.
“Open-source AI agent framework that lets users run Claude and other models locally across any device. ... Almost 3,000 people have commits in the repo... Jensen called it the most successful open source project in the history of humanity.”
Source→“Fun is velocity. The weeks I enjoyed building, the product got visibly better. The weeks I didn't, we shipped config options.”
Source→“I need to give NVIDIA a special shout out. Because they were very early and they simply asked me what I need. And then they sent people to take over much of the security work.”
Source→“Peter joined OpenAI as an employee/partner after OpenClaw went viral, choosing this over competing lab offers and VC money.”
Source→“when the big labs came knocking, and suddenly I was on the phone with Mark, Sam, a few others, this seemed like a much more interesting path. My gut told me that I like OpenAI the most.”
Source→“Steinberger's viral post — 'Are we still talking loops or did we shift to graphs yet?' — captured the field's recognized shift 'from single loops to networks of loops ('graphs').'”
Source→“Peter had previously sold a company for $100M, so he's already an 'experienced operator' in our taxonomy. While using Claude Code, he thought: when I'm eating, how can I continue using my Coding Agent? So he naturally built a hook connecting his Mac's Claude Code to his IM.”
Source→“OpenCraw runs on your Mac, so it can access all files on your Mac, access your calendar, your messages. The heartbeat mechanism lets it complete scheduled tasks. Its memoryMD system is very interesting — while ChatGPT and Claude Code all try to separate sessions to prevent context mixing, OpenCraw puts everything in one big conversation.”
Source→“Pete gets like thousands of pull requests a day on Open Claw. And then he just spins up like 50,000 Codex instances and then sorts through them and then merges like 1,000 of them.”
Source→“Silicon Valley spent the weekend debating 'tokenmaxxing' culture after OpenClaw creator and OpenAI employee Peter Steinberger revealed in a May 15 post that he had used roughly $1.3 million worth of OpenAI tokens in a month to build AI tools and automation systems.”
“Peter himself originally built OpenClaude for his own use... Unfortunately, Peter has already become a massive bottleneck on the project.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.