2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
need I continue?
Again, Peter is a good/great AI product manager but I don't see any distinguishing skills worth a billion dollars there. There's only one Openclaw but it's also been a few weeks since it came into existence? Openclaw clones will exist soon enough, and the community is WAY too small to be worth anything (unlike, say, Instagram/Whatsapp before being acquired by Facebook)
> 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
True, but not worth $100 million dollars - $1 billion dollars
> 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
The people getting massive compensation offers from AI companies are all AI-adjacent PhDs or people with otherwise rare and specialized knowledge. This is unrelated to people who have massive compensation due to being at AI companies early. And if we're talking about the world in general, yes the best thing to do to be rich is own real estate and assets and extract rent, but that has nothing to do with this compensation offer
> 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
Investments have a probable ROI, what's the ROI on a product manager?
> 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw, it's extremely niche right now.
There are roughly 8.1 billion humans, so 99.999999% (8 nines) of the world is 81 people. There were way more than 81 people at the OpenClaw hackathon at the Frontier Tower in San Francisco, so at least that much of humanity has heard of OpenClaw. If we guess 810 people know about OpenClaw, then it means that 99.99999% (7 nines) of humanity have not heard of OpenClaw.
If we take it down to 6 nines, then that's roughly 8,100 people having heard of OpenClaw, and that 99.9999% of humanity has not.
So I think you're wrong when you say "99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw". I'd guess it's probably around 99.9999% to 99.9999999% that hasn't heard of it. Definitely not 99.999999% though.
On the topic of brand recognition, 0.000001% of the world is 80 people (give or take). OpenClaw has ~200k GitHub stars right now.
On a more serious note, the world doesn't matter: the investors, big tech ceos, analysts do. Cloudflare stock jumped 10% due to Clawdbot.
Hype is weird. AI hype, doubly so. And OpenAI are masters at playing the game.
Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.
There is no lock in at all.
If you give your agent a lot of quantified self data, that unlocks a lot of powerful autonomous behavior. Having your calendar, your business specific browsing history and relevant chat logs makes it easy to do meeting prep, "presearch" and so forth.
And it makes a lot of sense - there’s billions of dollars on the line here and these companies made tech that is extremely good at imitating humans. Cambridge analytica was a thing before LLMs, this kinda tool is a wet dream for engineering sentiment.
It's also cool having the ability to dispatch tasks to dumber agents running on the GPU vs smarter (but costlier) ones in the cloud
money or morals, choose one
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
But the community not.
Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
1. Stable models
2. Stable pre- and post- context management.
As long as they keep mothballing old models and their interderminant-indeterminancy changes, whatever you try to build on them today will be rugpulled tomorrow.
This is all before even enshittification can happen.
Good for him, but no particular geniusness.
A couple of months ago, Gemini 3 came out and it was "over" for the other LLM providers, "Google did it again!", said many, but after a couple of weeks, it was all "Claude code is the end of the software engineer".
It could be (and in large part, is) an exciting--and unprecedented in its speed--technological development, but it is also all so tiresome.
Why would anybody pretend it's a good thing? Honestly you'd have to have something wrong with you.
From their standpoint, it's all the negativity that seems crazy. If you were against that, you'd have to have something wrong with you, in their view.
Hopefully most people can see both sides, though. And realize that in the end, probably the benefits will be slow but steady (no "singularity"), and also the dangers will develop slowly yet be manageable (no Skynet or economic collapse).
The guy is creative, but this is really just following the well known pattern of acquiring/hiring bright minds if only to prevent your competition from doing the same.
Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes
This could be the most disruptive software we have seen
Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.
Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?
(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)
AFAIK Anthropic won't let projects use the Claude Code subscription feature, but actually push those projects to the Claude Code API instead.
We're working on security and about 3 very key architectural improvements.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028331.
There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.
Effectively you can trust all of the companies out there right up until they are acquired and then you will regret all of the data you ever gave them. In that sense Facebook is unique: it was rotten from day #1.
Vehicles: anything made before 2005, SIM or e-SIM on board = no go.
I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now. Unfortunately you are now more or less forced to participate because your bank, your government and your social circle will push you back in. And I'm still pissed off that I'm not allowed to host any servers on a residential connection. That's not 'internet connectivity' that's 'consumer connectivity'.
It's a pity, they were doing well for a long time.
I'm surprised that someone on HN would paint all of HN with the same brush.
It's one of those 'lesser evils' things. If you know of a better email provider I'd love to know.
Such as?
These aloof comments that talk about something we're supposed to know about without referencing anything are very unhelpful.
( https://www.lemonade.com/fsd is an example )
After reading Jacques's response to my question, my list got smaller. Personally, I still like Proton, but I get that they have made some people unhappy. I also agree that Hetzner is a reliable provider; I have used them a bunch of times in the last ten years.
Then my friend, we have to worry about fiber/network providers I suppose.
This general topic is outside my primary area of competence, so I just have a loose opinion of maintaining my own domain, use encryption, and being able switch between providers easily.
I would love to see an Ask HN on secure and private agentic infra + frameworks.
and make sure the member/owners are all of like mind, and willing to pay more to ensure security and privacy
Exactly what I said. We need lower shareholder interference not more, and in co-operative it's the opposite.
> with immediate liability for their person.
What do you mean?
SECURITY
PRIVACY
---
Heyyy it never said "good privacy" perceive as you want...
Don't publicly acknowledge that you were the reason someone got murdered and 1000 VIPs got hacked.
One day when I'm deemed a 'Baddie', I looked at Apple as inspiration.
A company like AMD I would trust more than a company like Apple.
I don't really understand what this has to do with the post or even OpenClaw. The big draw of OpenClaw (as I understand it) was that you could run it locally on your own system. Supposedly, per this post, OpenClaw is moving to a foundation and they've committed to letting the author continue working on it while on the OpenAI payroll. I doubt that, but it's a sign that they're making it explicitly not an OpenAI product.
OpenClaw's success and resulting PR hype explosion came from ignoring all of the trust and security guardrails that any big company would have to abide by. It would be a disaster of the highest order if it had been associated with any big company from the start. Because it felt like a grassroots experiment all of the extreme security problems were shifted to the users' responsibility.
It's going to be interesting to see where it goes from here. This blog post is already hinting that they're putting OpenClaw at arm's length by putting it into a foundation.
Lol
Their marketing team got ya.
I aspire to be as good as Apple at marketing. Who knew 2nd or worse place in everything doesnt matter when you are #1 in marketing?
My trust does not extend that far.
It has been interesting to watch this take off. It wasn't the first or even best agent framework and it deliberately avoided all of the hard problems that others were trying to solve, like security.
What it did have was unnatural levels of hype and PR. A lot of that PR, ironically, came from all of the things that were happening because it had so many problems with security and so many examples of bad behavior. The chaos and lack of guardrails made it successful.
OpenAI has tried a lot of experiments over the years - custom GPTs, the Orion browser, Codex, the Sora "TikTok but AI" app, and all have either been uninspired or more-or-less clones of other products (like Codex as a response to Claude Code).
OpenClaw feels compelling, fresh, sci-fi, and potentially a genuinely useful product once matured.
More to the point, OpenAI needs _some_ kind of hyper-compelling product to justify its insane hype, valuation, and investments, and Peter's work with OpenClaw seems very promising.
(All of this is complete speculation on my part. No insider knowledge or domain expertise here.)
Atlas is OpenAIs browser
Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? That’s like the immediate use case for LLM-based app development.
This product should never have seen the light of day, at least not for the general public. The amount of slop that is now floating across Tiktok, YT Shorts and Instagram is insane. Whenever you see a "cute animals" video, 99% of it is AI generated - and you can report and report and report these channels over and over, and the platforms don't care at all, but instead reward the slop creators from all the comments shouting that this is AI garbage and people responding they don't care because "it's cute".
OpenAI completely lacks any sort of ethical review board, and now we're all suffering from it.
Of course the S in openclaw is for security.
This fucking guy will fit right in at OpenAI.
Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.
Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.
Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)
Comments like this feel confusing because I didn't have any association between Codex and OpenClaw before reading your comment.
Codex was also seeing a lot of usage before OpenClaw.
The whole OpenClaw hype bubble feels like there's a world of social media that I wasn't tapped into last month that OpenClaw capitalized on with unparalleled precision. There are many other agent frameworks out there, but OpenClaw hit all the right notes to trigger the hype machine in a way that others did not. Now OpenClaw and its author are being attributed for so many other things that it's hard for me to understand how this one person inserted himself into the center of this media zeitgeist
Regarding openclaw's hype, it is not about how you access it, but rather what the agents can access from you, and no one did that before. Probably because no one had the balls to put in the wild such unsecure piece of software
Its just happened that this one latched on a trend well and went viral, cease and desist from its name accelerated the virality
What’s fascinating is the pattern we’re seeing lately: people who explored the frontier from the outside now moving inside the labs. That kind of permeability between open experimentation and foundational model companies seems healthy.
Curious how this changes the feedback loop. Does bringing that mindset in accelerate alignment between tooling and model capabilities — or does it inevitably centralize more innovation inside the labs?
Either way, congrats. The ecosystem benefits when strong builders move closer to the core.
I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.
So if you invent something that might be worth $100B to the industry, you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.
Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.
Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?
I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?
They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.
I know that sounds like anthropomorphism, and maybe it is, but it most definitely does not feel like interacting with a coding agent. Claude is just the substrate.
Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.
So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.
No company could ship anything like OpenClaw as a product because it was a million footguns packaged with a self-installer and a couple warnings that it can't be trusted for anything.
There's a reason they're already distancing themselves from it and saying it's going to an external foundation
This is a vibe coded agent that is replicable in little time. There is no value in the technology itself. There is value in the idea of personal agents, but this idea is not new.
The value is in the hype, from the perspective of OpenAI. I believe they are wrong (see next points)
We will see a proliferation of personal agents. For a short time, the money will be in the API usage, since those agents burn a lot of tokens often for results that can be more sharply obtained without a generic assistant. At the current stage, not well orchestrated and directed, not prompted/steered, they are achieving results by brute force.
Who will create the LLM that is better at following instructions in a sensible way, and at coordinating long running tasks, will have the greatest benefit, regardless of the fact the OpenClaw is under the umbrella of OpenAI or not.
Claude Opus right now is the agent that works better for this use case. It is likely that this will help Anthropic more than OpenAI. It is wise, for Anthropic, to avoid burning money for an easily replicable piece of software.
Those hypes are forgotten as fast as they are created. Remember Cursor? And it was much more a true product than OpenClaw.
Soon, personal agents will be one of the fundamental products of AI vendors, integrated in your phone, nothing to install, part of the subscription. All this will be irrelevant.
In the mean time, good for the guy that extracted money from this gold mine. He looks like a nice person. If you are reading this: congrats!
(throw away account of obvious reasons)
of course--i use it every day. are you implying Cursor is dead? they raised $2B in funding 3 months ago and are at $1B in ARR...
But base vs code is fine for that too
Who?
> are you implying Cursor is dead? they raised $2B in funding 3 months ago and are at $1B in ARR
That is the problem. It doesn't matter about how much they raised. That $2B and that $1B is paying the supplier Anthropic and OpenAI who are both directly competing against them.
Cursor is operating on thin margins and still continues to losing money. It's now worse that people are leaving Cursor for Claude Code.
In short, Cursor is in trouble and they are funding their own funeral.
Whoever stands in front of the customer ultimately wins. The rest are just cost centers.
There is literally no need to shit on ur mom like that. Sorry your mom sucks at tech but can we please stop using this as a euphemism?
OpenAI is putting money where their mouth is: a one-man team can create a vibe-coded project, and score big.
Open-source, and hyped incredibly well.
Interesting times ahead as everyone else chases this new get-rich-quick scheme. Will be plentiful for the shovel makers.
If openai had done it themselves, immediate backlash.
OpenClaw and Claude Code aren't solving the same problems. OpenClaw was about having a sandbox, connecting it to a messenger channel, and letting it run wild with tools you gave it.
It took all of Peter’s time to move it forward, even with maintainers (who he complained got immediately hired by AI companies).
Now he’s gonna be working on other stuff at OpenAI, so OpenClaw will be dead real quick.
Also I was following him for his AI coding experience even before the whole OpenClaw thing, he’ll likely stop posting about his experiences working with AI as well
In spite of that, it’s incredibly obvious OpenClaw was pushed by bots across pretty much every social media platform and that’s weird and unsettling.
You work for OpenAI now. You don't have to worry about safety anymore.
This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.
With AI, it's one person who builds and takes everything.
Acquihires haven't worked that way for a while. The new acquihire game is to buy out a few key execs and then have them recruit away the key developers, leaving the former company as a shell for someone else to take over and try to run.
Also OpenClaw was not a one-person operation. It had several maintainers working together.
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
There is not much novel about OpenClaw. Anybody could have thought of this or done it. The reason people have not released an agent that would run by itself, edit its own code and be exposed to the internet is not that it's hard or novel - it's because it is an utterly reckless thing to do. No responsible corporate entity could afford to do it. So we needed someone with little enough to lose, enough skill and willing to be reckless enough to do it and release it openly to let everyone else absorb the risk.
I think he's smart to jump on the job opportunity here because it may well turn out that this goes south in a big way very fast.
Sounds like a threat - "I'm joining OpenSkynetAI to bring AI agents onto your harddisc too!"
The sandboxing part matters more than people think. Giving an LLM a browser with full network access and no isolation is a real security problem that most projects in this space hand-wave away.
Multi-provider LLM support (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, open-weight models via vLLM). In production with paying customers.
Happy to answer architecture questions.
poszlem•1h ago