Peter Steinberger's project, released in November 2025 and past 300,000 GitHub stars by early 2026 — a growth curve that says more about pent-up demand for a personal agent than about the code. Steinberger joined OpenAI in February 2026; the project stayed open source under the OpenClaw Foundation.
The design bet is breadth of channel. Where Claude Code is an agent in a terminal scoped to a repository, OpenClaw is an agent in your messages scoped to your life, which makes the interesting question a security one rather than a capability one: an always-on process holding your credentials, reachable from a chat app, running community-authored skills. Filed as a seed and evaluated — worth understanding, not yet worth trusting with a mailbox.