who created clawdbot

Clawdbot (now renamed Moltbot / OpenClaw) was created by Peter Steinberger , an Austrian software developer and entrepreneur best known as the founder of PSPDFKit (now Nutrient).

Who is the creator?

• Name : Peter Steinberger (often goes by @steipete online).

• Background : Long‑time iOS/Mac developer, founded PSPDFKit in 2011, grew it into a globally used PDF‑SDK company serving Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, and others, before stepping back after a 2021 funding round.

• Current role : Came out of semi‑retirement in 2025–2026 to build Clawdbot as a personal‑use AI assistant, which then went viral in early 2026.

How Clawdbot came about

• Peter originally sketched the idea of a “life assistant” in 2024 but shelved it until late 2025, when he realized big tech hadn’t yet delivered a truly personal, privacy‑focused AI agent.

• He built the first working prototype in about one hour , using Claude‑powered code to relay messages over WhatsApp and later expanded it into a multi‑channel, local‑first assistant (WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, etc.).

• The name “ClawdBot” was suggested by Claude, combining “Claude” with “claw” to evoke an AI with “hands” that can act in the real world.

Key project details

• Type : Open‑source, self‑hosted, local‑first AI assistant that can run on hardware such as a Mac Mini.

• Status : As of late January 2026, the project has tens of thousands of GitHub stars, a large Discord community, and has already been rebranded to Moltbot / OpenClaw due to naming issues.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.