By Ade Atobatele
sam just tricked us into building the one dataset they didn’t have for them. For Free!
If you missed the news this Sunday, Sam Altman just hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw.
On the surface, it looks like a standard talent acquisition. OpenAl grabbing the guy who built the most popular local agent framework.
But if you think this is just about hiring a smart engineer, you aren’t looking at the logs.
Since last year, we’ve been celebrating OpenClaw as the “sovereign” choice. It was the anti-cloud , local-first operating system that gave our LLMs “hands.”
We installed it, we gave it root access (against our better judgment), and we watched it fumble through our file systems, fix our broken Python scripts, and organize our lives.
We thought we were getting a free digital intern. What we were actually doing was labeling “Action Data” for free!
Here is the uncomfortable truth: OpenAl has enough text.
They have the entire internet. What they don’t have, or didn’t have enough of, is telemetry on execution.
They know how to write code. They don’t know how a human developer reacts when that code throws a SegFault at 2 AM.
They know how to draft an email. They don’t know the complex, multi-step logic of navigating a legacy CRM to find the recipient’s address. Open Claw fills that gap!
Every time your local agent tries a command, fails, reads the error log, and tries a different commana, it generates a data point more valuable than gold.
It is Reinforcement Learning from Agentic Feedback (RLAF). For all LLM’s!
By acquiring the OpenClaw ecosystem (and its “opt-in” telemetry), OpenAl didn’t just buy a tool.
They bought a distributed training lab.
We flocked to OpenClaw because we wanted privacy.
We wanted to keep our data off the servers. And yet, the very architecture of the agent, its “Reasoning Loops,” its memory files, its error correction protocols created the perfect blueprint for the next generation of closed-source models.
We are teaching the Al how to use a computer.
We are ironing out the edge cases. We are debugging the “World Simulator.”
I’m hopeful.
The integration of OpenClaw’s
“action-first” philosophy into the core of GPT means we are finally moving past the era of the “Chatbot.” We are entering the era of the Employee.
But let’s have a sense of irony about it. We spent 2025 demanding “Open Weights” and “Local Control,” only to hand over the keys to our terminals in 2026 because the product was just too convenient to resist.
We are building the automation that will eventually do our jobs.
And the brilliance of it? We’re doing it on our own hardware, on our own dime, and we’re thanking them for the privilege.
