The chatbot era may have just received its obituary. Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw — the open-source AI agent that took the developer world by storm over the past month, raising concerns among enterprise security teams — announced over the weekend that he is joining OpenAI to “work on bringing agents to everyone.” The OpenClaw project itself will transition to an independent foundation, though OpenAI is already sponsoring it and may have influence over its direction.The move represents OpenAI’s most aggressive bet yet on the idea that the future of AI isn’t about what models can say, but what they can do. For IT leaders evaluating their AI strategy, the acquisition is a signal that the industry’s center of gravity is shifting decisively from conversational interfaces toward autonomous agents that browse, click, execute code, and complete tasks on users’ behalf.From playground project to the hottest acquisition target in AIOpenClaw’s path to OpenAI was anything but conventional. The project began life last year as “ClawdBot” — a nod to Anthropic’s Claude model that many developers were using to power it. Released in November 2025, it was the work of Steinberger, a veteran software developer with 13 years of experience building and running a company, who pivoted to exploring AI agents as what he described as a “playground project.”The agent distinguished itself from previous attempts at autonomous AI — most notably the AutoGPT moment of 2023 — by combining several capabilities that had previously existed in isolation: tool access, sandboxed code execution, persistent memory, skills and easy integration with messaging platforms like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord. The result was an agent that didn’t just think, but acted.In December 2025 and especially January a …
