So who made this thing? I'll introduce you to Peter Steinberger, the founder of PSPDFKit, a PDF SDK used by companies like Dropbox and Autodesk. In November , he sat down on a Friday night and built the first version of OpenClaw over a single weekend. His goal was simple: wire an LLM into Telegram so it could browse the web and run shell commands on his behalf.
The prototype worked, so he open-sourced it the next week. Within months, the repo crossed K+ GitHub stars. If you're wondering who runs it now: on February , , Steinberger joined OpenAI to lead personal agent strategy. The project moved to an open-source foundation and lives on as a community-owned effort.