Peter Steinberger

Peter Steinberger, known online as steipete, created OpenClaw, an open-source personal AI agent. He joined OpenAI in February 2026 to work on bringing agents to a broader audience. OpenClaw is now stewarded by the independent OpenClaw Foundation. He describes his next mission as “an agent even my mum can use.”[5][4]

In his February 14, 2026 announcement, Steinberger explained why he chose OpenAI rather than turning OpenClaw into another large company. After spending thirteen years building a company, he wanted to concentrate on building itself: “I’m a builder at heart.” He believed teaming up with OpenAI was the fastest way to bring his work to everyone.[6]

Steinberger’s December 2025 account of his workflow explains a concrete reason for starting software projects with a command-line interface: agents can invoke the software directly and verify its output, closing a feedback loop. He described inference time and hard thinking as the main limits on how much software he could create; this was his assessment of his own practice, rather than a measured productivity comparison.[7]

His October 2025 essay on agentic engineering paired delegation with active intervention. When an agent took longer than expected, he would interrupt it, request a status update and decide whether to redirect it, stop it or let it continue. He argued that delegating code writing still left demanding work in architecture, system design, dependencies, features and user experience: “Just because I don’t write the code anymore doesn’t mean I don’t think hard about architecture, system design, dependencies, features or how to delight users.”[8]

At AI Engineer World’s Fair in 2026, Steinberger presented as OpenClaw’s creator and an OpenAI employee. Latent Space’s account of his OpenAI keynote quotes his division of responsibility: “the agent runs the inner execution loop; I set the direction and I make decisions in the outer loop.” That formulation places execution with the agent while keeping direction and decisions with the engineer.[2][3]

Before OpenClaw and OpenAI, Steinberger spent more than thirteen years building PSPDFKit. In his June 2025 reflection, he recalled selling his shares after Insight acquired a majority stake, feeling exhausted and needing a break. He later described sitting down to work on a new idea and realizing that his enthusiasm for building had returned. This earlier company-building experience supplies context for his subsequent decision to join OpenAI rather than build another large company.[9][6]