Nilay Patel

That's the open source AI agent framework that gave birth to Motebook.

Peter released OpenClaw in November of 2025.

It got popular last month, and now he has a job at OpenAI, probably with a hefty compensation package.

Sam Altman announced this news on X, calling Steinberger, quote, 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, and that, quote, we expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

Is this the pace we're at now, where you can just create a project like OpenClaw and then a couple months later, Sam Altman is saying you're a genius and paying you huge sums of money to not even acquire your project, to just hire you?

and put OpenKlana Foundation.

I do think it was fascinating that a huge part of the OpenClaw story was people buying Mac minis to run OpenClaw on because they recognized the security risks and they needed to literally put this thing on a different computer.

And then on that computer, they would log into all their accounts too.

So they would undo their own air gap that they had created by buying a Mac mini.

That feels like a big part of the overall AI story, right?

Definitely.

Google invented transformers and didn't release them because of safety concerns.

OpenAI just put out TrashGPT and it got huge adoption because they didn't think anybody would use it, so they were less worried about safety concerns.

Everybody knew agents were a thing, but the security concerns were a big deal.

One guy was like, screw it, OpenClaw.

Security concerns abound, but the product went viral because it's really useful.

He got hired for a bunch of money.

Like that's the dynamic here, right, is the people who ignore the obvious security and trust and safety concerns get out to a big lead and then everyone feels like they're catching up.

Is that the dynamic in sort of the labor market as a whole as well or is it just company by company?

We need to take a quick break.