Headline: OpenClaw’s Creator Faces Billion-Dollar Buyouts — and a Crypto-Fueled Nightmare — While Racing to Keep the Project Open Source
Peter Steinberger’s OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot) exploded into one of the fastest-growing open-source AI projects on GitHub — hitting roughly 180,000 stars — and instantly drew attention from tech titans. In a wide-ranging, three-hour interview with Lex Fridman, the Austrian developer said he’s now fielding acquisition interest from the likes of Meta and OpenAI, while also fending off a savage supply-chain attack staged by crypto scammers that nearly killed the project.
What OpenClaw is and why it matters
- OpenClaw is a self-modifying AI assistant that helped spawn the MoltBook frenzy and an expanding ecosystem of autonomous agents doing novel, sometimes bizarre tasks across the web. Its rapid adoption is fueling fresh debate about how agentic systems will reshape software — Steinberger predicts they’ll render “80% of apps” obsolete because an agent can act as a faster, more integrated API for services like fitness trackers, ride hailing and food delivery.
Corporate interest and the open-source condition
- Steinberger says he’s received concrete buyout overtures: Mark Zuckerberg reached out via WhatsApp (they even sparred for ten minutes about Claude Opus vs GPT Codex), and Sam Altman has offered something more tangible — access to significant compute tied to a Cerebras arrangement that could speed agent performance. Steinberger also disclosed conversations with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
- Despite the offers, his non-negotiable condition is that OpenClaw remain open source. “Maybe it’s gonna be a model like Chrome and Chromium. I think this is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs,” he told Fridman.
Money, costs and funding philosophy
- The project is expensive to run: Steinberger estimates monthly burn between $10,000 and $20,000. He routes sponsorship money back into dependencies and infrastructure rather than taking profit, and admits he’s currently losing money on the venture. He sold a previous company (PSPDFKit) and says he’s not motivated by cash — but the compute needs are real, and corporate offers are tempting.
The rebrand and the crypto-supply-chain assault
- The project’s name-change saga almost ended it. After Anthropic filed a trademark complaint arguing “Clawdbot” was too close to “Claude,” Steinberger briefly renamed the project to MoltBot — and in the brief window of switching names, crypto attackers struck.
- In a matter of seconds the attackers served malware from his GitHub, hijacked his NPM packages, and flooded his Twitter mentions with spam. Steinberger describes those hours as “the worst form of online harassment” he’s experienced: “I was close to crying… Everything’s fucked.” He seriously considered deleting the project.
- The subsequent rebrand to OpenClaw was executed with strict secrecy — decoy names and simultaneous account changes across platforms — to avoid another automated sniping wave.
How Steinberger builds and works
- Steinberger embraces what Andrej Karpathy calls “agentic engineering” (he jokingly rejects “vibe coding” as a slur). He often runs 4–10 agents at once, logged 6,600 commits in January alone, and says much of the codebase was produced by iterating with AI — “these hands are too precious for writing now,” he quipped. The result is a rapidly evolving agent platform that other developers can fork and extend.
What’s next
- Steinberger is weighing several paths: accept corporate backing that could materially accelerate development, start his own VC-backed company (which he fears would distract from building), or continue operating independently and bleeding cash. “I can’t go wrong,” he said, but his clear priority remains keeping the project open source.
Why crypto communities should care
- The attack vector that nearly ended OpenClaw — NPM and GitHub supply-chain compromises, rapid account sniping and malware distribution — is a reminder to crypto and open-source ecosystems of persistent risks around package security and reputation hijacking. The story also underscores the tension between decentralized, publicly auditable software and the centralized compute resources large firms can provide.
Bottom line: OpenClaw has become a lightning rod — a powerful open-source agent platform that attracted billion-dollar suitors and a vicious crypto-driven supply-chain attack within days. The developer’s choice — keep it open and risk bleeding cash, or accept corporate infrastructure and potentially cede control — could set a precedent for how major AI agent projects evolve in the open-source era.
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