When your viral growth engine starts driving massive adoption, most companies would nurture it. Not Anthropic—they banned it.
OpenClaw had become everything an AI company dreams of: 190,000 GitHub stars, 1.5 million active AI agents, and 2 million weekly visitors all defaulting to Claude models. Peter Steinberger’s open-source framework let users run personal AI agents locally, handling everything from email management to flight bookings across WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. Originally called “Clawdbot,” it served as an unofficial Claude evangelist, driving developers toward Anthropic’s API without costing the company a dime.
Then Anthropic decided to play hardball. In early January 2026, they cut off OpenClaw’s API access without warning and slapped Steinberger with a cease-and-desist over the “Clawdbot” name supposedly resembling “Claude.” The chaos was immediate and brutal—scammers hijacked the project’s GitHub and X accounts, launching a $16 million pump-and-dump scheme while the community scrambled to understand what happened.
Enter Sam Altman with perfect timing. By February, OpenAI announced they’d hired Steinberger to “drive the next generation of personal agents,” according to Altman’s X post. OpenClaw transitions to an OpenAI-supported independent foundation, remaining open-source but now optimizing for GPT models instead of Claude. It’s the kind of strategic hire that makes competitors weep into their quarterly reports.
The developer exodus started immediately. OpenClaw’s community had already shipped over 100 custom skills and Telegram support—momentum that now flows toward OpenAI’s ecosystem instead of Anthropic’s. “The future is going to be extremely multi-agent,” Altman noted, according to Times of India, and he just inherited the infrastructure to prove it. Meanwhile, industry observers summed up Anthropic’s blunder bluntly: “Anthropic had the most viral AI agent project and they fumbled it to OpenAI,” according to the Everyday AI podcast.
This isn’t just about one project—it’s about how the AI wars are shifting from model benchmarks to developer ecosystems. Anthropic chose legal enforcement over partnership, treating their biggest growth driver like a threat. OpenAI chose collaboration, turning Anthropic’s loss into their strategic win.
You’ve got to admire the irony: Anthropic reportedly raised $30 billion in funding to build Claude, only to hand OpenAI the keys to the agent kingdom for free.
