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OpenAI is in advanced discussions to hire OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger and a handful of other people helping to maintain the red hot open-source software for powering personal agents, according to two people directly involved in the discussions.

If those efforts are successful, Steinberger and his team will likely work on personal agents at OpenAI, as well as other products, the people said. As part of the discussions, the teams are discussing setting up a foundation to run the existing OpenClaw open source project. Meta Platforms has also been wooing Steinberger to join the company, which is competing aggressively for talent with OpenAI and others and has also made the development of personal agents a priority, according to these people.

(Following the publication of this story, Steinberger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed on X that Steinberger will join OpenAI and that a foundation supported by OpenAI will continue to oversee the OpenClaw open source project.)

Prior to the story’s publication, Steinberger said in a text message that he had not made a final decision about any offer. Last week, Steinberger told the podcaster Lex Fridman that he was personally spending between $10,000 and $20,000 a month to fund costs related to OpenClaw and was having discussions about working with various large AI labs, the “most interesting” of which were his conversations with Meta and OpenAI.

Steinberger previously said that partnering with an AI company could be the fastest way to develop OpenClaw.

The move comes after a whirlwind few weeks for OpenClaw, which has created a frenzy in tech by giving people a way to set up powerful AI agents that can control their computers and perform complex tasks such as creating new marketing materials based on a recording of a business meeting or booking a dentist appointment.

While agents have been a buzzy category of AI software for over a year, most agents so far have been focused on handling a particular kind of task, such as using enterprise software from Microsoft or Salesforce. The agents that have gotten the most traction, Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, are coding agents that are designed to write and edit software.

OpenClaw became a viral sensation because it allows users to draw on different AI models from various providers and allows users to grant their agents unfettered access to their computers.

Setting up the software requires some technical skills, especially to ensure that OpenClaw agents don’t have overly broad access to sensitive information, which has so far limited its adoption to users with technical chops. As a result, one area of improvement for OpenAI could be making OpenClaw easier to set up, perhaps by incorporating it into OpenAI’s existing agent product.

In an essay confirming that he will join OpenAI, Steinberger said he didn’t have the appetite to build OpenClaw into a big business on his own. “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.”