#491 – OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet – Peter Steinberger

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, formerly known as Moldbot, Claudebot, Claudeus, Claude, spelled with a W, as in lobster claw. Not to be confused with Claude, the AI model from Anthropic, spelled with a U. In fact, this confusion is the reason Anthropic kindly asked Peter to change the name to OpenClaw. So, what is OpenClaw? It's an open-source AI agent that has taken over the tech world in a matter of days, exploding in popularity, reaching over 180,000 stars on GitHub, and spawning the social network mold book where AI agents post manifestos and debate consciousness, creating a mix of excitement and fear in the general public, in a kind of AI psychosis, a mix of clickbait fear-mongering and genuine, fully justifiable concern about the role of AI in our digital interconnected human world. OpenClaw, as its tagline states, is the AI that actually does things. It's an autonomous AI assistant that lives in your computer, has access to all of your stuff if you let it, talks to you through Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage and whatever else messaging client uses whatever AI model you like, including Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.3 codecs, all to do stuff for you. Many people are calling this one of the biggest moments in the recent history of AI since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 The ingredients for this kind of AI agent were all there, but putting it all together in a system that definitively takes a step forward over the line from language to agency, from ideas to actions, in a way that created a useful assistant that feels like one who gets you and learns from you in an open source community driven way is the reason OpenClaw took the internet by storm. Its power in large part comes from the fact that you can give it access to all of your stuff and give it permission to do anything with that stuff in order to be useful to you. This is very powerful, but it is also dangerous. OpenClaw represents freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility. With it, you can own and have control over your data, but precisely because you have this control, you also have the responsibility to protect it from cybersecurity threats of various kinds. There are great ways to protect yourself, but the threats and vulnerabilities are out there. Again, a powerful AI agent with system-level access is a security minefield, but it also represents the future, because when done well and securely, it can be extremely useful to each of us humans as a personal assistant. We discuss all of this with Peter and also discuss his big picture programming and entrepreneurship life story, which I think is truly inspiring. He spent 13 years building PSPDFKit, which is a software used on a billion devices. He sold it and for a brief time fell out of love with programming. Vanished for three years and then came back, rediscovered his love for programming and built in a very short time an open source AI agent that took the internet by storm. He is in many ways the symbol of the AI revolution happening in the programming world. There was the ChatGPT moment in 2022, the DeepSeek moment in 2025, and now in 26, we're living through the Open Claw moment, the age of the lobster, the start of the agentic AI revolution. What a time to be alive. Now, a quick few second mention of a sponsor, check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Quo for a phone system, calls, texts, contacts for your business, CodeRabbit for AI-powered code review, Fin for customer service AI agents, Blitzy for AI-powered software development, Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electrolytes, and of course, our old friend Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. And really, they are the incredible folks that make this whole thing possible. And I really do hope to do more episodes in 2026, have more fun, take more risks, and explore deeply the full range of human possibility, of human condition, of human nature, of human civilization. Anyway, if you get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's a business phone platform for calling and messaging. So it's basically a really nice interface, a really nice system for organizing all the incoming calls, texts, voicemails, recordings. When you have a team and you have a large number of customers that want different things, it's a nice way to organize everything together. I just love watching the beauty, the elegance of the interface. I'm such a sucker for beautiful interfaces, not just beautiful, but functional. So the perfect mix of beauty and function in evolutionary biology and in software design, software engineering is just wonderful to watch. And that of course relates to the very topic of this podcast, is how to create software systems like that with the utilization of the agentic loop. And as Peter talks about, still keeping the human apart, a fundamental part of that process of adding what he says, I think correctly, sort of a bit of love into the thing, a bit of that human touch. I don't know what exactly that is, but we know it when we see it, when we feel it, when we interact with it, and that is the magic that makes great software. So anyway, Quo has that, love the interface. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/lex. That's quo.com/lex.