The Real Reason: Creator Joins OpenAI
This isn’t about infrastructure. It’s about competition.
The timing isn’t subtle. OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger recently joined OpenAI — and Anthropic’s response came barely weeks later, suggesting the company views Steinberger’s defection as reason enough to wall off his creation from their ecosystem. It’s competitive hardball wrapped in subscription policy language.
Steinberger’s move to OpenAI gave that company access to someone who deeply understood Claude’s strengths and weaknesses from building integration tools. Anthropic’s response suggests they view OpenClaw as a potential intelligence-gathering operation now that its creator works for a direct rival.
Anthropic is pushing users toward Claude Cowork instead — a native tool that keeps user interactions entirely within their ecosystem while offering similar functionality to what OpenClaw provided.
Lock out the competition. Promote your own tools. Control the ecosystem. Classic tech playbook.
Do you think this move was about engineering — or about eliminating a rival? 💬