The Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday. On the closing day of "Snowflake Summit 26," the annual Snowflake event that opened Sunday, the developer venue resembled a fan-signing event for a famous singer. The reason was the appearance of Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, on the developer presentation stage set up beside the exhibition hall. When Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy introduced the "Claw Father," cheers erupted. The red lobster with large claws symbolizes OpenClaw.
During the brief 30-minute session, developers gathered in the venue pulled out their smartphones to capture Steinberger's image and voice, and attendees who could not find seats stood to listen to the talk. In his presentation, he stressed that artificial intelligence (AI) agent technology is still in its early stages and that challenges must be solved. While an era will come where everyone has an agent like a smartphone, security and device issues, among others, must be resolved along the way, he said. He also briefly offered his views on why he created OpenClaw and how agents will evolve going forward.
"Agents are already performing parts of work even at home, but it's still just the beginning. There are far more things we need to solve. They are very smart in some areas but appear very foolish in others—we call this spiky intelligence. This is an amazing tool that everyone should use, but it is not a person. You could say it's like a very good hammer. It will take some time to understand how to hold the hammer and where its weaknesses and strengths lie. It's getting better and better over time."
What drew attention that day was less the content of the talk than the developers who flocked to see Steinberger. Just like Steinberger, who had a red lobster plush attached to his bag, there were "true fans" who showed up with lobster plushes pinned to their chests. As soon as the talk ended, developers formed long lines to take photos together, unable to contain their joy as if meeting a star. Security personnel made the developers leave for the next event, but moments later a crowd of fans again surrounded Steinberger outside the venue. Steinberger, seemingly awkward in the situation, gave a sheepish smile and asked, "What is going on?" CEO Ramaswamy, who came off the stage with Steinberger, also slipped away with his eyes wide in apparent surprise as he watched the fans crowding outside the venue. Why do developers idolize Steinberger so much?
Burnout After Selling a Company He Led for 13 Years... The Story of OpenClaw, Built in One Hour
Born in 1986, Steinberger opened the era of mainstream AI agents at the age of 40. He is not a case of a genius developer who made a name for himself at a young age—like Alexander Wang, who was recruited as Meta's chief AI officer for an astronomical salary in his 20s—nor is he from a major U.S. Big Tech firm. While he was not a star developer from the start, analysts say his story from founding a company to creating OpenClaw is resonating among aspiring entrepreneurs and developers who want to showcase innovative technology.
Steinberger founded a company (PSPDFKit) that developed the PDF file format for mobile, ran it for 13 years, and then sold it. He had grown the company to 60 employees, but a sense of emptiness set in after the sale, and exhausted in mind and body, he stayed away from the industry for three years. Then, as an AI boom took hold in 2023 following the COVID-19 pandemic, he began to take interest in new technology. Although he succeeded in an exit through the sale of the company, it was not a case where he made a fortune or was caught by Big Tech's eye and recruited.
It took only one hour for Steinberger to become a famous developer. Last November, he built a platform where giving commands in natural language through a popular messenger like WhatsApp prompts an agent on the PC to respond and carry out work. In his developer talk at Snowflake Summit 26, he said: "Whenever I get annoyed, a good idea comes to me. One day in November, I went up to the kitchen and got annoyed again. I thought, why can't I do this when all I need to do is send a small prompt to my computer? I grabbed some food, went down, and built it in an hour."
Opened the Era of Mainstream AI Agents
The platform was originally named Claud. After Anthropic raised an issue that the name was the same as its AI, Claude, the name was changed to Moltbot, and finally became OpenClaw by combining the open-platform nature with the claw. OpenClaw was released on an open-source platform this January and gained explosive popularity as a local agent that runs on an ordinary PC without connecting to the internet-dependent cloud. In China, a "lobster-raising" craze took hold, with people creating personal assistants using OpenClaw on Apple's small computers such as the Mac mini.
Steinberger became the figure who shifted the AI market from being chatbot-centered to agent-centered. On Monday, Microsoft (MS) unveiled "Scout," an agent that runs 24 hours a day, at "Build," its annual developer conference held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Scout was built on OpenClaw, the open-source agent platform. It can be used for various purposes in corporate organizational operations, such as having an agent request a schedule change from the organizer when meeting times overlap, or having sales staff ask the agent questions instead of a supervisor. MS has come to present OpenClaw—which MS CEO Satya Nadella compared to a "virus" citing security vulnerabilities this February—as one of its flagship services. Steinberger took the stage at MS Build and stressed that "OpenClaw runs on Windows (MS's operating system)."
Agent Pioneer Recognized Even by Jensen Huang
Another reason developers are enthusiastic is that Steinberger was recruited in February by OpenAI, regarded as a leading AI company, and is responsible for OpenAI's agent business. OpenAI, along with Anthropic, is engaged in a fierce battle for the lead ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) this year. At a top AI company valued at close to $1 trillion, Steinberger is leading agent development.
Even Nvidia launched the Nemo Claw platform, similar to OpenClaw, in March. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised it at the time, saying, "OpenClaw will become the most important software in history," and at the Computex 2026 event held in Taipei, Taiwan, last week, he stressed that "an era will come where agents handle work and learn on behalf of users."
