OpenClaw creator receives offers from Meta and OpenAI

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he has received acquisition offers from both Meta and OpenAI. The open-source agent, which exploded in popularity within weeks, has already gained 180,000 GitHub stars and become the core of a fast-growing ecosystem of autonomous AI agents. Steinberger emphasized that he will consider a sale only if OpenClaw remains permanently open and free.

According to him, Mark Zuckerberg reached out directly via WhatsApp, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered access to large-scale compute, including Cerebras systems that could dramatically accelerate development. Despite the big names and potential advantages, Steinberger maintains that the project is “too important to belong to a single company.”

Steinberger admitted that maintaining the project generates monthly losses of $10,000 to $20,000. He redirects all sponsorship funds to dependent libraries, taking no personal profit. The financial strain worsened after a series of attacks during the project’s renaming. When, following an Anthropic complaint, he changed the name from Clawdbot to MoltBot, crypto scammers hijacked his accounts within five seconds between browser tab refreshes. They injected malicious code into his GitHub, stole NPM packages, and turned his X account into a spam flood. Steinberger called it “the worst form of online harassment.”

The second rebrand to OpenClaw was executed under strict secrecy, using false names, synchronized account updates, and coordination through private channels to prevent another attack. The crisis nearly pushed him to delete the project entirely.

Steinberger continues to develop OpenClaw using what he calls “agent engineering.” He works with four to ten agents simultaneously and made 6,600 commits in January alone, saying he “writes code by talking to AI rather than typing.”

He believes next-generation AI agents will transform the software market. In his view, such systems “will kill 80% of all apps,” because any service effectively becomes a slow API that an agent can call directly.

At the same time, he admits he is unsure what to do next: form a company and raise venture capital, or continue building independently while declining acquisition offers. Steinberger noted that he is also in discussions with Satya Nadella, but monetization remains a secondary concern.

“I can’t afford to be wrong,” he says, stressing that his top priority is unwavering: OpenClaw must remain open source.