OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Sunday that the creator of the viral AI agent OpenClaw is joining the company, and that the service will “be maintained as an open-source project within a foundation, with ongoing support from OpenAI.”

Formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw was launched last month by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger.

Its popularity has skyrocketed, fueled in part by social media attention, as both consumers and businesses flock to tools that can autonomously perform tasks, make decisions, and act on users’ behalf without constant human oversight.

In a post on X, Altman said Steinberger is “joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents.”

“He is 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,” Altman wrote. “We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.”

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but AI companies, including OpenAI, have been spending heavily to attract top talent.

In May, OpenAI acquired iPhone designer Jony Ive’s AI devices startup, io, for more than $6 billion.

Meta and Google have also invested billions to recruit AI developers and researchers.

OpenAI, most recently valued at $500 billion and aiming to increase that figure, faces stiff competition in the generative AI space, particularly from Google and Anthropic, whose AI models are increasingly being adopted by businesses to handle more tasks