Meta and OpenAI Vie for AI Agent Platform OpenClaw—Developer Balances Takeover Offers with Open Source Commitment

Meta and OpenAI have made formal acquisition offers for OpenClaw (CLAW), the self-modifying AI agent platform developed by Peter Steinberger, according to a recent interview. OpenClaw hit 180,000 GitHub stars in record time and has drawn interest from major tech leaders, including a WhatsApp outreach from Mark Zuckerberg and a proposal from Sam Altman tied to Cerebras computational power. Steinberger has insisted any corporate buyout must preserve the open-source model, stating he routes all sponsorships to dependencies and currently spends $10,000–$20,000 monthly to defend the project. He faced a sophisticated cyber-attack after a rebrand to combat trademark issues with Anthropic, involving malware, hijacked NPM packages, and spam, which nearly led to project deletion. Steinberger, who practices "agentic engineering," predicts agent platforms like OpenClaw will render many traditional applications obsolete by acting as proactive, personalized interfaces. He is weighing a standalone venture despite concerns about distraction, but remains focused on the project's open-source future.