The chatbot era is quietly coming to an end, and OpenAI just made the hire that signals what comes next.
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind OpenClaw, one of the most viral open source AI agent frameworks ever built, is joining OpenAI. CEO Sam Altmansaid on X that Steinberger will “drive the next generation of personal agents” at the company.
The move signals that OpenAI is pivoting from selling model access toward something far more ambitious: AI that acts on your behalf without being asked.
OpenClaw surged to 200,000 GitHub stars and 2 million weekly visitors in just weeks after launching, drawing competing offers from Meta and other top labs. Both companies reportedly made offers valued in the billions. OpenAI won.
It is worth pausing on what that competition says about the moment we are in. The race for agent talent is now just as fierce as the race for foundation models was two years ago. Whoever owns the agent layer owns the interface between AI and the real world, and every major lab knows it.
OpenClaw was not just another tool
OpenClaw gives AI models the ability to operate inside desktop environments, clicking buttons, filling out forms, navigating apps and coordinating with other agents to complete multi-step tasks.
Think of it less like a chatbot and more like a capable digital employee who can log into your services, clear your inbox, book travel and handle recurring tasks while you sleep.
That is meaningfully different from what ChatGPT does today. Unlike pre-programmed tools, OpenClaw-powered agents can adapt to interface changes and make contextual decisions in real time. They do not break when a website updates its layout. They figure it out.
Steinberger explained his decision in a blog post, writing that bringing truly useful personal agents to everyone “requires resources and infrastructure that only a handful of companies can provide.”
He spent 13 years building his previous company, PSPDFKit. He chose joining OpenAI over starting another one.
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That is a telling decision. Steinberger is not a first-time founder chasing a paycheck. He is a seasoned builder who looked at what it would take to scale agents globally and concluded that going it alone was not the fastest path. OpenAI gave him the runway to think bigger.
Altman confirmed OpenClaw will remain open source under an independent foundation that OpenAI will support, keeping the developer community intact and the ecosystem growing outside the company’s walls.
Business model shift nobody is talking about
This hire is not just about technology. It is about money, specifically, a new kind of money OpenAI wants to make.
Right now, OpenAI’s core revenue comes from two buckets: API access, where developers pay per token to use its models, and subscriptions like ChatGPT Plus, Team and Enterprise, which charge flat or per-seat fees.
Both models require users to stay in the loop. You ask, the model answers, you decide what happens next. Personal agents flip that dynamic entirely.
Once an AI agent starts acting inside other platforms, booking flights, managing vendor invoices, renewing software licenses, entirely new revenue models emerge:
- Transaction fees on completed actions, similar to how payment processors and app stores monetize today.
- Tiered autonomy subscriptions where higher plans unlock more complex, hands-free workflows.
- Enterprise licensing for agent fleets that coordinate across entire business operations.
The key insight is that agents create value that is easy to price. If an AI agent saves a business 20 hours of labor a week, charging $500 a month for that agent is an easy sell.
That kind of value-based pricing is far more lucrative than a flat $20 monthly subscription.
OpenAI is already laying the groundwork. The company recently launched Frontier, an AI agent platform for enterprises, with early customers including Uber, Intuit, State Farm and Oracle.
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OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company’s next phase will focus on agents and workflow automation that run continuously, carry context over time and take action across tools, directly mirroring what Steinberger built with OpenClaw.
Why investors and competitors should pay attention
The financial stakes are enormous.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar confirmed the company hit $20 billion in annualized revenue in 2025, up from $6 billion in 2024 and $2 billion in 2023. But it is still burning through cash at a rate that demands new revenue streams urgently.
Agents are the most credible path to fixing that. Analysts warn cumulative losses before profitability could reach $143 billion, putting intense pressure on OpenAI to monetize beyond subscriptions and into higher-margin, usage-driven products.
The ripple effects extend well beyond OpenAI. Cloud providers, payment networks and travel platforms must decide whether these agents are partners or rivals.
Enterprise software companies face a direct threat if AI agents begin automating workflows that SaaS tools currently own.
Hardware makers supplying GPUs will likely see demand surge as always-on agent workloads require intensive, continuous inference.
The competitive pressure is real. OpenAI faces intense competition from Google and Anthropic, whose models are increasingly being used by enterprises to automate business tasks. Google’s Gemini agents are already being tested inside Workspace. Anthropic’s computer use feature lets Claude operate desktops directly. OpenAI needed to move fast.
OpenAI is not just buying talent. It is buying credibility, an open source ecosystem, and a framework that 1.5 million users have already adopted to automate their daily lives.
For users, the change will feel gradual and then sudden. Instead of opening an app and typing a question, they will increasingly find that a quiet agent already handled it. OpenAI wants to own that moment. And now it has the person who helped prove it was possible.