Clodbot, Moltbook and OpenClaw: It all started with Peter Steinberger
A former iOS developer has become the latest sensation in the tech community. He’s Peter Steinberger and he’s the same guy behind Clawbot, now called OpenClaw, who created Moltbook, a social media site where AI bots can hangout.
Imagine it’s 2060 and the war between AI and humans is in full swing. At that moment, when you talk to humans they all say the same thing: It all started with Peter Steinberger. Yes, it’s a leap of imagination. And there is no possibility of anything like this happening. But if for some reason, somehow, it turns out to be true, the record may show that it all started with Peter Steinberger. That’s because he’s the same person who recently created Clodbot, which was previously renamed Moltbot and is now called Openclaw. After this the tool created a website called Moltbook, where AI bots are gathering and talking to humans on many things including independence.
We have written about Moltbuk. You should check the details completely here. But what about the man himself? Who is Peter Steinberger?
Until he made headlines about a week ago after creating Clodbot, Peter was your regular – albeit successful – developer. He is Austrian, and unlike many other famous software developers who often move to Silicon Valley or find their footing in a big tech company, Peter has been living in Austria following his education at the Technische Universität Wien and HTL Braunau.
The few materials available online about him suggest that he has always been a tinkerer. According to an interview given to Semaphore in 2019, Peter started his first company in 2010 because he wanted to solve some of the problems people were having with their PDFs on iOS. Speaking of which, developing for iOS has been his specialty. This company, started in 2010, became PSPDFKit, which is still going strong as a B2B company helping others manage PDF files. But after the success of his company, Peter took a step back from it and ventured into different projects.
According to some viral posts on social media, including one by Peter Yang, which was re-shared on X, Steinberger notes that he was feeling lost “after working on PSPDFKit for 13 years.” Yang wrote, “They partied, moved countries, and wandered around, before realizing that you don’t find purpose. You make it.”
The story, as it is told, is that Peter has been a part of about 43 projects “before OpenClaw went viral with 100k GitHub stars and 2M visits.”
From Clodbot to Moltbot to Openclaw
We have mentioned about Clodbot before and you should read it completely. But just a refresher: Clawbot, now called OpenClaw after a former name change to Moltbot, is an AI tool that lets people create their own personal AI assistant. This AI lives on your local computer, although it is powered by popular AI models like Anthropic Cloud and Google Gemini.
Given that Peter specializes in iOS, obviously the best implementation of Clodbot is on a Mac Mini, an Apple computer. This, for a short time, pushed the Mac Mini off the shelves in Silicon Valley.
But just as ClaudeBot attracted the crowds, so did Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI. As a result, Peter started getting some encouragement from anthropic lawyers.
To avoid IP and copyright issues, Peter first changed the name of the project to Moltbot. But eventually its name became OpenClaw. Peter wrote, “Cloud was born in November 2025 – a playful joke on a cloud with a claw. This seemed perfect until Anthropic’s legal team politely asked us to reconsider. Fair enough.” “Next came Moltbot, chosen in a chaotic 5 a.m. brainstorm with the community. It made sense, but it never took off. OpenClaw is where we land. And this time, we did our homework: trademark searches came up clear, domains purchased, migration code written. The name suggests what this project has become.”
Peter has also attracted a large section of critics, who have criticized his project for ignoring data security and privacy implications. But he defended OpenClaw, saying it is a hobby project: “The crap I get for offering a hobby project for free is quite a lot,” he wrote on X. “People treat it like a multi-million dollar business. Security researchers are demanding bounties. Heck, I can barely afford a Mac Mini from sponsors. It’s supposed to inspire people. And I’m glad it does. And yes, most non-techies should not install it. It’s not finished, I know about it. Sharp, hey, it’s not even 3 months old and despite rumors otherwise, I sometimes fall asleep.”
