The post OpenClaw Creator Gets Big Offers to Acquire AI Sensation—Will It Stay Open Source? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

In brief The creator of open-source AI agent platform OpenClawd said that he’s received acquisition offers from Meta and OpenAI. Peter Steinberger said he would only agree to a deal if the project can remain open source. He expects that AI agents can eliminate 80% of current apps, due to their versatility. Peter Steinberger built the most important open-source AI agent in no time. Now Meta and OpenAI are circling with acquisition offers, he said last week, while crypto scammers turned his rebrand into a 24-hour nightmare that almost made him quit. OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot)—the self-modifying AI assistant that sparked MoltBook’s viral chaos and an entire ecosystem of autonomous agents doing increasingly weird and amazing stuff on the internet—hit 180,000 GitHub stars in record time. The Austrian developer who “vibe coded” it into existence said he’s now choosing between billion-dollar corporate buyouts and staying true to the open-source ethos that made it explode. “My conditions are that the project stays open source,” Steinberger told Lex Fridman in a three-hour interview for his podcast. “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.” Both Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman have made concrete offers, Steinberger said. Zuckerberg reached out via WhatsApp, and they spent 10 minutes arguing about whether Claude Opus or GPT Codex was better. Altman’s pitch came with something more tangible: A promise of computational power tied to the Cerebras deal that could dramatically speed up agent performance. The project is currently hemorrhaging $10,000 to $20,000 monthly, he said. Steinberger routes all sponsorship money to dependencies rather than pocketing it. “Right now I lose money on this,” he said matter-of-factly, like someone who sold his previous company PSPDFKit and genuinely doesn’t care about…

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Filed under: News - @ February 15, 2026 8:06 pm