ClawHosters
by Daniel Samer
3 min read
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind OpenClaw, is now at OpenAI. Sam Altman called him "a genius" on X and announced he'll lead the next generation of personal agents. As TechCrunch reported on February 15, this is an acqui-hire. OpenAI hired the person, not the project.
So what happens to OpenClaw?
The Foundation Model
OpenClaw is moving to an independent open-source foundation. Think Linux Foundation or the Cloud Native Computing Foundation behind Kubernetes. Community maintainers take over day-to-day development, OpenAI sponsors the project, and the MIT license stays exactly where it is.
In his own blog post, Steinberger wrote that keeping OpenClaw open source was a non-negotiable condition for joining. His exact words: "It's always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish."
That matters. A public commitment like that creates accountability.
The Skepticism Is Fair
Let's be honest. OpenAI and the word "open" have a complicated relationship. The company is literally in litigation over its own nonprofit-to-for-profit transition right now. If you're skeptical about whether foundation governance will hold up in practice over the next 12 months, that's reasonable.
But there's a difference between a direct acquisition (where a company owns the code) and a foundation model (where community maintainers control direction). The governance structure mirrors what has worked for Linux and Kubernetes for years. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it's a stronger position than most open-source projects find themselves in after their creator moves on.
What This Means for ClawHosters Customers
Nothing changes at the infrastructure level. Your instance keeps running. Updates keep coming. The codebase that powers your agent is still MIT-licensed and actively maintained by a growing contributor base (190,000+ GitHub stars and counting).
If anything, the foundation structure adds stability. OpenClaw is now less dependent on one person and backed by institutional resources it didn't have before. And as a managed hosting provider, we handle upstream changes so you don't have to. When security patches drop (remember the exposed instances found via Shodan during the name change chaos?), we apply them. You just use your agent.
The code is what runs your business. And the code isn't going anywhere.
