Peter Steinberger

Steinberger was born and raised in rural Austria, and at age 14 a summer guest introduced him to a personal computer, sparking his obsession with computers. He recalled that he used Windows for a long time, then went through a long phase with Linux, building his own kernels; after starting university he saw the white plastic MacBook, found it “a thing of beauty,” and converted to the Mac.⁠[1][2][2]

He studied software engineering at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), from which he graduated, and taught iOS and Mac development there.⁠[1][3]

In 2010, Steinberger received a job offer in San Francisco, and the visa process dragged on; while waiting, he built the first version of PSPDFKit out of curiosity. He recalled that it started when he wanted to help a friend display a PDF on an iPad, found the existing solutions poor, and felt he could do better. PSPDFKit began as an iOS-only project with just him working on it.⁠[4][4][2][2][2][5]

At a WWDC party in 2011 he got a position at a startup in San Francisco; he expected the visa to take a month, but it took more than six months, during which he stopped freelancing, finished his bachelor’s degree, and tried the paid component business, building a business that made more money than the full-time job possibly could. That year he founded PSPDFKit GmbH, which he bootstrapped without outside investment; he then went to San Francisco and worked at that startup as a senior iOS engineer.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][3][3]

On April 6, 2012, Steinberger announced that he had booked his flight back to Austria and would be a full-time indie developer again from April 13. He wrote that managing a job of more than 40 hours a week alongside another “full-time job” was nearly impossible, as PSPDFKit’s support requests and ideas exploded along with its revenue; he wanted to focus on making PSPDFKit even better, and said he would miss San Francisco but could not replace life-long friends.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

In May 2014, Steinberger extracted and polished the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) code from PSPDFKit and released it as the open-source library Aspects, which can run code before, instead of, or after an original method implementation. The same year, PSPDFKit began developing its Android SDK and reworked most of its code to be reusable across platforms.⁠[7][7][5]

By 2016, PSPDFKit had about 30 employees and offered frameworks for iOS, Android, and the web, with customers including Dropbox, Evernote, BoxBoxBox is an American enterprise software company founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith and others, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It provides cloud content management, file sharing, collaboration, e-signature and AI content-processing tools, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2015 under the ticker BOX.Open the full entry, IBM, and SAP. Steinberger said at the time that the company had not taken the funding route and had never sought investors, because it was already profitable and more money would not have made it grow much faster; he said he did not plan to bring in venture capitalists or angel investors in the future either.⁠[4][5][4][4][4][4]

In April 2018, Steinberger spoke at the TU Wien Innovation Incubation Center about bootstrapping, in a talk titled “Bootstrapping – The long road to success,” covering his path from freelancer to CEO of an international company while deliberately not taking venture capital, and the hard transition from “builder” to “manager.” By 2019, PSPDFKit had grown from a one-person company to more than 40 people, its products had expanded to Android, the web, Windows, and macOS, and its code had long since passed one million lines.⁠[3][3][3][8][8]

PSPDFKit announced its first strategic growth investment, led by Insight Partners and totaling more than €100 million; at the time nearly a billion end users relied on applications built on its platform, and co-founder Jonathan Rhyne was CEO. As part of the transaction, co-founders Steinberger and Martin Schürrer stepped back from their full-time roles but remained significantly invested. Steinberger later wrote that he sold his PSPDFKit shares and that Insight acquired the majority; on his personal website he describes it as a “nine-figure exit.”⁠[9][9][9][9][9][10][10][11]

He recalled that running PSPDFKit for 13 years was high stress, and that what wore him down most was people issues, including differences and conflicts with his co-founders and high-stress situations with customers; before the deal he had already spent two years making himself “obsolete.” After leaving he found he could not get code out anymore, so he booked a one-way trip to Madrid to “catch up on life.”⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Steinberger said that after selling the company in 2021 he basically did not touch his computer for about three years and used only his phone. On November 20, 2024, he posted “We are so back” on X; he later wrote that one day he had a new idea, sat down at his computer and started hacking, realized that “my spark is back,” and believed AI was changing software development and indeed the world.⁠[12][10][10][10]

From 2025 he wrote extensively on his blog about using AI coding agents. He wrote that he had run Claude Code for two months in a mode that skips all permission prompts, saving an hour a day, and guarded against accidents with hourly snapshots; in June he, Mario, and Armin built VibeTunnel in about 24 hours, bringing the Mac terminal into the browser so AI agents could be checked and directed at any time. With his old friend Orta Therox he also created Claude Code Anonymous, a meetup for “full-breadth developers”; after the first London event, chapters followed in Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, San Francisco, Delft, and elsewhere.⁠[13][13][14][14][15][15][15][15]

On June 4, 2025, pushcx, an administrator of the technology link community Lobsters, banned Steinberger’s website domain steipete.me with the reason “Startup slop.” Steinberger said the trigger was that he used AI agents to help write parts of his blog posts, and that the post that set it off was his most popular article, “Claude Code is My Computer”; when he tried to discuss it with a moderator, he was met with insult and deprecation.⁠[16][17][17][17]

He responded in a post on August 2, 2025, acknowledging that he openly uses agents to assist his writing and that his website’s repository is public, with every commit visible; he said he too hates AI slop, that his posts on X are entirely handwritten, and that some articles he writes word for word while others are learning notes doubling as guides for agents. He argued that writing should be judged on its own merits, that “you can create slop with or without agents, as you can create great work with or without,” and said he was not angry about being blocked, since that was not a community he wanted to be part of.⁠[17][17][17][17][17][17][17]

Steinberger said he had wanted an AI personal assistant since April 2025, and in November, “annoyed that it didn’t exist,” he prompted it into existence. The weekend project, initially called “WhatsApp Relay,” was later renamed Clawdbot and then Moltbot before settling on the name OpenClaw in January 2026; he wrote that the project had grown beyond what he could maintain alone, so he began adding maintainers and was working out how to pay them properly, full time if possible.⁠[2][2][18][18][18][18]

Steinberger published a post describing his approach to agentic engineering, titled “Shipping at Inference-Speed,” with the subtitle “Why I stopped reading code and started watching it stream by.” He wrote that he could now ship code at a speed that seemed unreal and that his output was mostly limited by inference time and hard thinking; he no longer read much code, only watching the stream and looking at key parts, while knowing where the components are, how things are structured, and how the overall system is designed.⁠[19][20][19][19][19]

AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry considered the project name “Clawd” too similar to the name of its Claude models and made a trademark claim, forcing a rename; in the gap during the rename, the GitHub and X accounts were hijacked by crypto scammers and used to promote a fake token called CLAWD. Steinberger denied any involvement with the token and asked the crypto community on X to stop harassing him, saying he would “never do a coin.” He later said it was the worst online harassment he had ever experienced, that at one point he was “close to crying,” and that he nearly deleted the entire project, refraining only out of consideration for the contributors who had already invested their time.⁠[21][21][21][21][2][2][2][2]

On episode 491 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, Steinberger said that after the project went viral nearly every major venture capital firm wanted to meet him, and that he could start another company but felt he had done it before, was no longer excited by it, and feared a conflict of interest between an open-source version and a commercial one; at the time he was paying to keep the project going himself, losing roughly $10,000 to $20,000 a month. He said that of the major labs he had talked to, Meta and OpenAI seemed the most interesting, and that whichever he chose, his condition was that the project stay open source, perhaps on a model like Chrome and Chromium.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

On February 14, Steinberger announced that he was joining OpenAI to work on “bringing agents to everyone,” with OpenClaw moving to a foundation and remaining open and independent. He wrote that OpenClaw could well become a huge company, but that he is “a builder at heart,” had already poured 13 years into building a company, and wanted to change the world rather than run a large company, and that teaming up with OpenAI was the fastest way to bring this to everyone; his next mission was to build an agent that “even my mum can use.” The next day, OpenAI CEO Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry announced on X that Steinberger was joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents.⁠[22][22][22][22][22][23]

He has since led a team inside OpenAI called Claw Labs, which works on shared product improvements. When the OpenClaw Foundation was established in July 2026, the foundation said Steinberger still leads the project, especially its technical decisions.⁠[24][25]

On October 3, 2026, Steinberger posted on X: “Do I know anyone at Google who could help? We’re now over a week in review limbo for OpenClaw’s Android app.” About half an hour later, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai replied under the post: “Ack, will follow up.”⁠[26][26][27][27]

Steinberger has written on his personal blog since 2012, at first mostly about runtime techniques in iOS development, workarounds for UIKit bugs, and PSPDFKit’s engineering practices, and from 2020 also a series on how to manage Twitter; since 2025 his posts have focused on programming with AI agents and introduced tools he released, such as VibeTunnel, Peekaboo, and Poltergeist. He says he releases everything he builds as open source.⁠[20][12][11]

Steinberger has long spoken at iOS and mobile development conferences. In 2026 he told the story of creating OpenClaw at TED2026, gave the opening keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair, and spoke or held conversations at Microsoft Build, the NVIDIA GTC pregame show, VivaTech, YC Startup School, OpenAI DevDay, and other events.⁠[3][28][28][28][28][28][28][28]

Personal website: https://steipete.me/ (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

X: Public account: https://x.com/steipete (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steipete/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/steipete (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

Bluesky: Public account: https://bsky.app/profile/steipete.me (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

OpenClaw Foundation: Official website: https://openclaw.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Nutrient (formerly PSPDFKit): Official website: https://www.nutrient.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]