OpenClaw Founder Peter Steinberger Interview: When Apps Melt Away, How a "Lobster" Sparks a Personal AI Agent Revolution

Full Interview: Clawdbot’s Peter Steinberger Makes First Public Appearance Since Launch

Starting with “The World’s Most Expensive Alarm Clock”: Do you dare say “Surprise me” to your AI?

OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger tried it. The result? His AI Agent

SSH’d into his computer in the middle of the night and turned the volume up to max to wake him up.

It sounds like a plot from a sci-fi movie gone wrong, but this happened to a retired engineer coming back from burnout.

This isn’t just a story about a prank; it’s a story about how we are redefining “software”.

This project changed its name three times in just a few months, from Clawdbot (a tribute to Claude), to Maltbot (symbolizing a lobster molting and growing), and finally to OpenClaw (symbolizing openness and community). Just like its lobster mascot, this project keeps molting and growing, eventually becoming one of the hottest “AI Agent” projects on GitHub.

Clawdbot → Moltbot → OpenClaw. The Fastest Triple Rebrand in Open Source History - Reddit

Apps will melt away

Have you counted how many Apps are on your phone? To book a restaurant, hail a ride, track expenses, or check the weather, we need to switch between countless interfaces.

Peter proposes a core philosophy:

Apps will melt away

Simply put, in the future AI era, we won’t need specific Apps to solve problems. Through APIs and powerful AI Agents, you simply state your needs, and the AI Agent will handle everything for you.

For example, you take a photo of food, and the AI Agent automatically looks up the calories and logs it into your health database, without you ever needing to open a calorie tracking App.

AI Agents actually understand Unix better

If you are an engineer, you might notice that current AI tools often come with fancy Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs).

But Peter discovered that AI is actually the best system administrator. They don’t need pretty buttons; they only need:

A white-on-black terminal (CLI)
A clear Help menu

This is why OpenClaw chose a different path:

Agents know Unix

By leveraging existing Unix tools and CLI commands, AI Agents can combine functions more flexibly, becoming more powerful and extensible than any GUI tool.

Finding the thrill of coding again at 3 AM

Peter calls this development style “Vibe Coding” or “VIP Coding”.

He describes how collaborating with AI at 3 AM feels like

No longer painful debugging, but pure creation.

By embracing AI-generated code, he found his coding Mojo again. Here, ideas are more important than the code itself, because the AI will handle the implementation details.

OpenClaw emphasizes “Local-first”. In a time when personal data privacy is valued, being able to run an AI Agent on your own hardware (like a Mac Mini) means you can completely control your own data,

Bypassing the Red Tape of big tech companies and reclaiming true data sovereignty.

This is not a startup, this is a “Hacker Playground”

After OpenClaw went viral, countless VCs (Venture Capitalists) came with checks wanting to invest. But Peter chose to refuse. Why?

Because he is already financially free. This venture is not for money, but for “Fun” and “Inspiration”.

He established a non-profit foundation with only one goal: to let this project “Outlive him”.

He hopes OpenClaw will become a public good like Linux, rather than a tool hijacked by commercial interests.

Being honest about security

Unlike commercial companies that try to hide security issues, Peter openly admits that “Prompt Injection” is still an unsolved mystery in the AI Agent field.

He positions OpenClaw as a “Hacker Playground”, inviting security experts worldwide to “dismantle” and attack it. Only through this extreme transparency and community collaboration can we find the true path to security.

Even more interesting is his strategy against commercialization:

Fighting “Commercialization” with “Extreme Quality”

The best way to prevent an open source project from being maliciously resold is to

Make the free open source version so good that no one can make money by packaging it.

This is a domineering attitude that only a non-profit mindset can achieve.

Conclusion: We are witnessing a paradigm shift in software development

OpenClaw is not just a tool; it foreshadows a future where “Everyone is a Developer”.

Through natural language, we can all build our own proprietary software tools to solve our unique problems.

This lobster (OpenClaw) has finished molting, ready to lead us into a new era of App melting and personal data autonomy.

Peter’s vision tells us that the future software world should not be defined by a few big companies, but should be built by every one of us users.

Are you ready to raise your own “customized” AI Agent?

OpenClaw Founder Peter Steinberger Interview: When Apps Melt Away, How a “Lobster” Sparks a Personal AI Agent Revolution