OpenClaw maintainer Peter Steinberger gives 5-month project update

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, delivered a keynote at AI Engineer describing the project's first five months. He characterized OpenClaw as the fastest-growing project in GitHub history, noting its growth curve was described by a friend as "stripper pole growth" — a straight vertical line rather than a hockey stick. The project has accumulated around 30,000 commits, is approaching 2,000 contributors, and is closing in on 30,000 pull requests, with velocity still accelerating as of early April.

Steinberger described running the OpenClaw Foundation alongside his role at OpenAI as "running a company on hard mode," citing the difficulty of coordinating volunteers without direct authority.

Steinberger described running the OpenClaw Foundation alongside his role at OpenAI as "running a company on hard mode," citing the difficulty of coordinating volunteers without direct authority. He highlighted contributors from Nvidia, Microsoft (working on a Windows app and MS Teams integration), Red Hat (helping with security and Dockerization), Tencent, and ByteDance — noting that Chinese companies represent some of the largest user bases. The bulk of his recent focus has been on security: OpenClaw has received 1,142 advisories totaling roughly 16.6 per day, with 99 classified as critical. Of those, 469 have been published and 60% closed. He noted this volume is approximately twice that of both the Linux kernel and curl, and observed that the loudest, most alarming-sounding reports tend to be the most likely to be AI-generated "slop."

The keynote also covered a Q&A session moderated by @swyx, ranging from OpenClaw's relationship with OpenAI and the importance of open and local models, to topics like coding workflows, defining "taste" in AI development, giving AI agents personality, prompt injection risks, and a future vision involving "dreaming" and modularity for agents, as well as what skills will matter for maintainers going forward.

Key facts

1. 01OpenClaw is described as the fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub history, now five months old.
2. 02The project has around 30,000 commits, nearly 2,000 contributors, and is approaching 30,000 PRs.
3. 03OpenClaw has received 1,142 security advisories — roughly 16.6 per day — with 99 classified as critical.
4. 04469 advisories have been published and 60% have been closed.
5. 05OpenClaw receives approximately twice as many security reports per day as the Linux kernel and twice as many total as curl.
6. 06