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There are a few take aways I think the detractors and celebrators here are missing. 1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while ha

• mjr00 8mo ago
  > 1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while having AI do all the work for you." This buy out for something vibe coded and built around another open source project is meant to keep the hype going. The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worried about being directly liable for all the harms OpenClaw can do. This is a great take and hasn't been spoken about nearly enough in this comment section. Spending a few million to buy out Openclaw('s creator), which is by far the most notable product made by Codex in a world where most developer mindshare is currently with Claude, is nothing for a marketing/PR stunt.
  • AlexCoventry 8mo ago
    He's also a great booster of Codex. Says he greatly prefers it to Claude. So his role might turn out to be evanglism.
    • ass22 8mo ago
      Yup, hes highly delusional if he actually thinks Sam cares about him and the project. Its all about optics.
      • DANmode 8mo ago
        Who purported that Sam cares about him? Why would he care if Sam cares about him?
        • whattheheckheck 8mo ago
          Listen to him on a podcast? He said he liked Zuckerberg being more personal with him and Sam was colder
        • ass22 8mo ago
          Someone clearly hasnt watched the podcast. Do your research before posting.
          • DANmode 8mo ago
            These are comments on the posted article. If you want to bring other sources into the conversation, you could link, or at least reference them by name upfront, right?
      • catoc 8mo ago
        He’s not “highly delusional” He literally said he doesn’t give a fuck about money and ”I will get the fuck out of there [openai] if I don’t like it“ [source friedman interview] This guy is very smart, and very persistent. I really don’t get all the negativity about the acquisition and especially not about him.
• Aurornis 8mo ago
  > This buy out for something vibe coded I think all of these comments about acquisitions or buy outs aren’t reading the blog post carefully: The post isn’t saying OpenClaw was acquired. It’s saying that Pete is joining OpenAI. There are two sentences at the top that sum it up: > I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent. OpenClaw was not a good candidate to become a business because its fan base was interested in running their own thing. It’s a niche product.
  • TSiege 8mo ago
    Fair enough. Call it a high profile acquihire then
    • daveidol 8mo ago
      “Acquihire” means there was an acquisition. This is just a hire.
    • baruz 8mo ago
      What got acquired?
      • Nevermark 8mo ago
        A portfiolio of PR.
  • tummler 8mo ago
    I don't mean to be cynical, but I read this move as: OpenAI scared, no way to make money with similar product, so acqui-hire the creator to keep him busy. I'd love to be wrong, but the blog post sounds like all the standard promises were made, and that's usually how these things go.
    • blackoil 8mo ago
      It isn't an acqui-hire just a simple hiring. Also unless creator is some mythical 100x developer, there will be enough developers
• jrsj 8mo ago
  There’s plenty of straightforward reasons why OpenAI would want to do this, it doesn’t need to be some sort of malicious conspiracy. I think it’s good PR (particularly since Anthropics actions against OpenCode and Clawdbot were somewhat controversial) + Peter was able to build a hugely popular thing & clearly would be valuable to have on the team building something along the lines of Claude Cowork. I would expect these future products to be much stronger from a security standpoint.
  • jetbalsa 8mo ago
    I suspect Anthropic was seeing a huge spike of concurrent model usage at a too fast of a rate that claude code just doesn't do, CC is rather "slow" at api calls per minute. Also lots and lots of cache, the sheer amount of cache that claude does is insane.
    • jrsj 8mo ago
      It’s hard to say exactly what prompted the decision but they banned people paying $200/mo without warning & without any reasonable appeal system in place. It’s a Google form that is itself reviewed by some automated system that may or may not ever get back to you. This was already an ongoing issue prior to 3rd party tools using Claude subscriptions, there are reports of false positive automated bans going back for several months. I have not seen or heard of this happening w/ Codex, and rather than trying to shut down 3rd party tools that want to integrate with their ecosystem they have worked with those projects to add official support. I’m more impressed with Codex as a product in general as well. Their new desktop app is great & feels an order of magnitude better than Claude’s. Overall HN crowd seems heavily biased in favor of Anthropic (or maybe just against OpenAI?) but IMO Anthropic needs to take a step back and reset. If they keep on the current path of just making small iterative improvements to Claude Code and Claude Desktop they are going to fall very far behind.
• alephnerd 8mo ago
  Most of these are good callouts, but I think it is best for us to look at the evolution of the AI segment in the same manner as "Cloud" developed into a segment in the 2000s and 2010s. 3 is always a result of GTM and distribution - an organization that devotes time and effort into productionizing domain-specific models and selling to their existing customers can outcompete a foundation model company which does not have experience dealing with those personas. I have personally heard of situations where F500 CISOs chose to purchase Wiz's agent over anything OpenAI or Anthropic offered for Cloud Security and Asset Discovery because they have had established relations with Wiz and they have proven their value already. It's the same way that PANW was able to establish itself in the Cloud Security space fairly early because they already established trust with DevOps and Infra teams with on-prem deployments and DCs so those buyers were open to purchasing cloud security bundles from PANW. 1 has happened all the time in the Cloud space. Not every company can invent or monetize every combination in-house because there are only so many employees and so many hours in a week. 2 was always a more of a FTX and EA bubble because EA adherents were over-represented in the initial mindshare for GenAI. Now that EA is largely dead, AI Safety and AGI as in it's traditional definition has disappeared - which is good. Now we can start thinking about "Safety" in the same manner we think about "Cybersecurity". > They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released I think that adds unnecessary emotion to how platform businesses operate. The reality is, a platform business will always be on the lookout to incorporate avenues to expand TAM, and despite how much engineers may wish, "buy" will always outcompete "build" because time is also a cost. Most people ik working at these foundation model companies are thinking in terms of becoming an "AWS" type of foundational platform in our industry, and it's best to keep Nikesh Arora's principle of platformization in mind. --- All this shows is that the thesis that most early stage VCs have been operating on for the past 2 years (the Application and Infra layer is the primary layer to concentrate on now) holds. A large number of domain-specific model and app layer startups have been funded over the past 2-3 years in stealth, but will start a publicity blitz over the next 6-8 months. By the time you see an announcement on TechCrunch or HN, most of us operators were already working on that specific problem for the past 12-16 months. Additionally, HNers use "VC" in very broad and imprecise strokes and fail to recognize what are Growth Equity (eg. the recent Anthropic round) versus Private Equity (eg. Sailpoint's acquisition and then IPO by Thoma Bravo) versus Early Stage VC rounds (largely not announced until several months after the round unless we need to get an O1A for a founder or key employee).
• ass22 8mo ago
  "build a hugely popular tool" Define hugely popular relative to the scale of users of OAI... personally this thread is the first time Ive heard of openclaw.
  • Rapzid 8mo ago
    Last week it was renamed from "Clawd" and this week the creator is abandoning it. Everything is moving fast.
    • rlt 8mo ago
      Don’t forget “Moltbot” between “Clawdbot” and “OpenClaw”! I think that named lasted about 24 hours, but it was long enough to spawn MoltBook.
  • NickNaraghi 8mo ago
    you living under a rock
  • alephnerd 8mo ago
    The tech industry is broad, and if you are using OpenAI in a consumer and personal manner you weren't the primary persona amongst whom the conversation around OpenClaw occurred. Additionally, much of the conversation I've seen was amongst practitioners and Mid/Upper Level Management who are already heavy users of AI/ML and heavy users of Executive Assistants. There is a reason why if you aren't in a Tier 1 tech hub like SV, NYC, Beijing, Hangzhou, TLV, Bangalore, and Hyderabad you are increasingly out of the loop for a number of changes that are happening within the industry. If you are using HN as your source of truth, you are going to be increasingly behind on shifts that are happening - I've noticed that anti-AI Ludditism is extremely strong on HN when it overlaps with EU or East Coast hours (4am-11am PT and 9pm-12am PT), and West Coast+Asia hours increasingly don't overlap as much. I feel this is also a reflection of the fact that most Bay Area and Asia HNers are most in-person or hybrid now, thus most conversations that would have happened on HN are now occurring on private slacks, discords, or at a bar or gym.
    • 8mo ago
• nilkn 8mo ago
  This comment is filled with speculation which I think is mostly unfounded and unnecessarily negative in its orientation. Let's take the safety point. Yes, OpenClaw is infamously not exactly safe. Your interpretation is that, by hiring Peter, OpenAI must no longer care about safety. Another interpretation, though, is that offered by Peter himself, in this blog post: "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research." To conclude from this that OpenAI has abandoned its entire safety posture seems, at the very least, premature and not robustly founded in clear fact.
  • nosuchthing 8mo ago
    OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission (November 2025) https://theconversation.com/openai-has-deleted-the-word-safely-from-its-mission-and-its-new-structure-is-a-test-for-whether-ai-serves-society-or-shareholders-274467 https://theconversation.com/openai-has-deleted-the-word-safe... Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008560 Other words removed: responsibly unconstrained safe positive
    • sheept 8mo ago
      The headline implies they selectively removed the word "safely," but that doesn't seem to be the case. From the thread you linked, there's a diff of mission statements over the years[0], which reveals that "safely" (which was only added 2 years prior) was removed only because they completely rewrote the statement into a single, terse sentence. There could be stronger evidence to prove if OpenAI is deemphasizing safety, but this isn't one. [0]: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bcf25/revisions https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bc...
      • Der_Einzige 8mo ago
        [flagged]
    • notJim 8mo ago
• motoboi 8mo ago
  This is basically acquihire. Peter seems really a genius and they better poach him before Anthropic do.
  • rlt 8mo ago
    Is he? My impression of Clawdbot was it was a good idea but not particularly technically impressive or even well-written. I had all kinds of issues setting it up.
    • motoboi 8mo ago
      It’s a wonderful idea. Vibe coded, but not his first rodeo. Exited on his first company on 110M, then some years of the whole huasca and forest thing, then started creating projects. Clawdbot (later openclaw) was his 44th try.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• jsemrau 8mo ago
  What is interesting about OpenClaw is it's architecture. It is like an ambient intelligence layer. Other approaches up until now have been VSCode or Chromium based integrations into the PC layer.
• isodev 8mo ago
  > 2. Any pretense for AI Safety concerns that had been coming from OpenAI really fall flat with this move. And Peter, creating what is very similar to giant scam/malware as a service and then just leaving it without taking responsibility or bringing it to safety.
• abalone 8mo ago
  I think this comment misses that OpenAI hired the guy, not the project. "This guy was able to vibe code a major thing" is exactly the reason they hired him. Like it or not, so-called vibe coding is the new norm for productive software development and probably what got their attention is that this guy is more or less in the top tier of vibe coders. And laser focused on helpful agents. The open source project, which will supposedly remain open source and able to be "easily done" by anyone else in any case, isn't the play here. The whole premise of the comment about "squashing" open source is misplaced and logically inconsistent. Per its own logic, anyone can pick up this project and continue to vibe out on it. If it falls into obscurity it's precisely because the guy doing the vibe coding was doing something personally unique.
  • croes 8mo ago
    So creating unsafe software is the new norm?
    • tacomagick 8mo ago
      Yes pretty much. See the Windows 11 security vulnerability chaos going on.
    • isoprophlex 8mo ago
      Always has been.
      • croes 8mo ago
        Nah, it was normal but not the norm
    • revolvingthrow 8mo ago
      I’d bet good money that at leasy 2/3 of all software ever made, the decision makers couldn’t care less about security beyond "let’s get that checkbox to show we care in case we get sued". Higher velocity >> tech debt and bugginess unless you work at nasa or you're writing software for a defibrillator, especially in the current "nothing matters more than next quarter results".
• simbleau 8mo ago
  I think they want the man and ideas behind the most useful AI tool thus far. Surprisingly, and OpenAI may see this - it is a developer tool. OpenAI needs a popular consumer tool. Until my elderly mother is asking me how to install an AI assistant like OpenClaw, the same way she was asking me how to invest in the "new blockchains" a few years ago, we have not come close to market saturation. OpenAI knows the market exists, but they need to educate the market. What they need is to turn OpenClaw into a project that my mother can use easily.
• avaer 8mo ago
  > The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worried about being directly liable for all the harms OpenClaw can do. This is true, and also true for many other areas OpenAI won't touch. The best get rich quick scheme today (arguably not even a scheme) is to test the waters with AI in an area OpenAI would not/cannot for legal, ethical, or safety reasons. I hate to agree with OpenAI's original "open" mission here, but if you don't do it, someone else somewhere will. And as much as their commitment to safety is just lip service, they do have obligations as a big company with a lot of eyeballs on them to not do shady things. But you can do those shady things instead and if they work out ok, you will either have a moat or you will get bought out. If that's what you want.
• neya 8mo ago
  I am not a fan of OpenAI but they are not exactly hiring a security researcher. They are hiring an aspiring builder who has built something the masses love. They can always provide him the structure and support he needs to make his products secure. It's not mutually exclusive (safety vs hiring him).