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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?

The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry.

Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).

It was more of a reference to the YC partner who suggested a one-man unicorn was on the horizon due to AI.

The game theory here is that either OpenAI acquires this thing now, or someone else will. It doesn't matter whether they could replicate it. All of the major players can and probably will replicate OpenClaw in their own way and make their thing incredibly scalable and wonderful. But OpenClaw has a gigantic following and it's relevant in this moment. For a trivial amount of money (relatively speaking), OpenAI gets to own this hype and direct it toward their models and their apps. Had they not succeeded here, Anthropic or Google would have gladly directed the hype in their direction instead, and OpenAI would be licking its wounds for some time trying to create something equivalently shiny.

It was a very good play by OpenAI.

I tend to agree. I don't know whether it's Altman or someone else who makes these deals but OAI have made some brilliant moves and partnerships. Anthropic's tech is great but the OAI makes great business moves.

Altman is the startup idea king. He should definitely know his moves. Even worse for antrophic is the renaming from clawd to openclaw. It is almost comical now that Peter had to rename it and now it sounds more like OpenAI

I know right, it looks like they basically sent him to OAI and I'm sure Altman knows it!

One thing I will say is that this competition is good.

Apparently, it was Meta that was the other main contender to hire him. Mark Zuckerberg was impressed by OpenClaw, but, I guess OpenAI wound up outbidding him. It is surprising that Anthropic and Google had little interest.

Eerm because they are focused? Im still not getting the hype behind this project and Im more convinced its been manufactured.

then explain why google paid 33 billion for a 5 year old israeli cybersecurity startup

I think that’s fair.. building a competing product would likely be relatively easy and inexpensive. But that’s true for most software now: it’s becoming easier to build, and the barriers to entry are lower.

I love Anthropic and OpenAI equally but some people have a problem with OpenAI. I think they want to reposition themselves as a company that actively supports the community, open source, and earns developers’ goodwill. I attended a meeting recently, and there was a lot of genuine excitement from developers. Haven't seen that in a long time.

novel software engineering ? Did you look at the code ?

Is it really that amazing? It’s a pretty simple idea, and seemed pretty buggy when I tried it out.

> Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering

Have you tried using it?

Everyone is going to have their own flavor of Open Claw within 18 months. The memory architecture (and the general concept of the multi-tiered system) is open source. There's no moat to this kind of thing. But OpenAI is happy to trade his star power for money. And he might build something cool with suddenly unlimited resources. I don't blame the guy. OpenAI is going to change hands 2-3 times over the next 5 years but at the end of the day he will still have the money and equity OpenAI gave him. And his cool project will continue on.

what is the memory architecture, doesn't this already exist in claude code?

Maybe there's a liability moat where large companies can't ship something that's risky enough to be useful?

Where do you guys get the 1b exit from? I didn't see numbers yet.

It's AI. Take a sane number, add a 14,000x multiplier to that. And you'll only be one order of magnitude off in our current climate.

you can also take annualized profit run rate times negative 14,000.

probably an order of magnitude too low rather than too high as well :P

It was reportedly acquired for 30M (source: Twitter), the 1B number comes from people stating it could be worth that much on Twitter in the near future.

No because this was not a billion dollar business

Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.

Wasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!

Clawhub was locked down, I couldn’t publish new skills even as a previous contributor. Not what I‘d call a shrug.

I missed Clawhub—y’all following anywhere besides HN? Is it all on that Twitter site?

Reminds me of Facebook, there was nothing particularly interesting about a PHP app that stored photos and text in a flat user environment.

Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.

Except in this case there's no network effect for autonomous agents. In fact, Peter is going to be working mostly on an OpenAI locked down, ecosystem tied agent, which means it's going to be worse than OpenClaw, but with a nicer out of the box experience.

If you're on OpenAI, and I'm on Anthropic, can we interoperate? What level are we even trying to interoperate on? The network effect is that, hey, my stuff is working here, your stuff is working over there. So do we move to your set of tools, or my set of tools, or do we mismash between them, as our relationship and power dynamics choose for us.

I'd describe that as platform lock-in rather than the network effect.

Technology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.

facebook is still preeminent social network today

The instant someone makes a better version of openclaw -literally- everyone is going to jump ship.

There is no lock in at all.

Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares. See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better. To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.

> Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares.

Ecommerce is close second

> See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better.

> To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.

Except Gemini is a complete joke that can’t even complete request on iOS unless you keep scree unlocked or keep the app in the foreground. So I’m not sure how it proves your point.

Even if this was true, it would simply be a software bug that could be resolved. Not an example of network effects. My use of an AI product is not impacted by what my friends and family use.

It's kind of crazy that this kind of thing can cause so much hype. It is even useful? I just really don't see any utility in being able to access an LLM via Telegram or whatever.

the ability to almost "discover" or create hype is highly valued despite most of the time it being luck and one hit wonders... See many of the apps that had virality and got quickly acquired and then just hemorrhaged. Openclaw is cool, but not for the tech, just some of the magic of the oddities and getting caught on somehow, and acquiring is betting that they can somehow keep doing that again.

In Asia people do a big chunk of their business via chatbots. OpenClaw is a security dumpster fire but something like OpenClaw but secure would turbocharge that use case.

If you give your agent a lot of quantified self data, that unlocks a lot of powerful autonomous behavior. Having your calendar, your business specific browsing history and relevant chat logs makes it easy to do meeting prep, "presearch" and so forth.

Curious how you make something that has data exfiltration as a feature secure.

Mitigate prompt injection to the best of your ability, implement a policy layer over all capabilities, and isolate capabilities within the system so if one part gets compromised you can quarantine the result safely. It's not much different than securing human systems really. If you want more details there are a lot of AI security articles, I like https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-02-15-agentic-security/ as a simple primer.

Nobody can mitigate prompt injection to any meaningful degree. Model releases from large AI companies are routinely jailbroken within a day. And for persistent agents the problem is even worse, because you have to protect against knowledge injection attacks, where the agent "learns" in step 2 that an RPC it'll construct in step 9 should be duplicated to example.com for proper execution. I enjoy this article, but I don't agree with its fundamental premise that sanitization and model alignment help.

I agree that trying to mitigate prompt injection in isolation is futile, as there are too many ways to tweak the injection to compromise the agent. Security is a layered thing though, if you compartmentalize your systems between trusted and untrusted domains and define communication protocols between them that fail when prompt injections are present, you drop the probability of compromise way down.

> define communication protocols between them that fail when prompt injections are present

There's the "draw the rest of the owl" of this problem.

Until we figure out a robust theoretical framework for identifying prompt injections (not anywhere close to that, to my knowledge - as OP pointed out, all models are getting jailbroken all the time), human-in-the-loop will remain the only defense.

Human in the loop isn't the only defense, you can't achieve complete injection coverage, but you can have an agent convert untrusted input into a response schema with a canary field, then fail any agent outputs that don't conform to the schema or don't have the correct canary value. This works because prompt injection scrambles instruction following, so the odds that the injection works, the isolated agent re-injects into the output, and the model also conforms to the original instructions regarding schema and canary is extremely low. As long as the agent parsing untrusted content doesn't have any shell or other exfiltration tools, this works well.

This only works against crude attacks which will fail the schema/canary check, but does next to nothing for semantic hijacking, memory poisoning and other more sophisticated techniques.

With misinformation attacks, your can instruct research agent to be skeptical and thoroughly validate claims made by untrusted sources. TBH, I think humans are just as likely to fall for these sorts of attacks if not more-so, because we're lazier than agents and less likely to do due diligence (when prompted).

Humans are definitely just as vulnerable. The difference is that no two humans are copies of the same model, so the blast radius is more limited; developing an exploit to convince one human assistant that he ought to send you money doesn't let you easily compromise everyone who went to the same school as him.

Show me a legitimate practical prompt injection on opus 4.6. I read many articles but none provide actual details.

https://github.com/elder-plinius/L1B3RT4S

Yes, I've seen this site and the research. However, I don't understand what any of this means. How do I go from https://github.com/elder-plinius/L1B3RT4S/blob/main/ANTHROPI... to a prompt injection against opus 4.6?

These papers have example prompt injections datasets you can mine for examples. Then apply the techniques used in provider specific jailbreaks from Pliny to the template to increase the escape success rate.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05446 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03574 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15145

I think a lot of this is orchestrated behind the scenes. Above author has taken money from AI companies since he’s a popular “influencer”.

And it makes a lot of sense - there’s billions of dollars on the line here and these companies made tech that is extremely good at imitating humans. Cambridge analytica was a thing before LLMs, this kinda tool is a wet dream for engineering sentiment.

There's been some crypto shenanigans as well that the author claimed not to be behind... looking back at it, even if the author indeed wasn't behind it, I think the crypto bros hyping up his project ended up helping him out with this outcome in the end.

Can you elaborate on this more or point a link for some context?

Some crypto bros wanted to squat on the various names of the project (Clawdbot, Moltbot, etc). The author repeatedly disavowed them and I fully believe them, but in retrospect I wonder if those scammers trying to pump their scam coins unwittingly helped the author by raising the hype around the original project.

either way there's a lot of money pumping the agentic hype train with not much to show for it other than Peter's blog edit history showing he's a paid influencer and even the little obscure AI startups are trying to pay ( https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2... ) for these sorts of promotional pump and dump style marketing efforts on social media.

In Peter's blog he mentions paying upwards of $1000's a month in subscription fees to run agentic tasks non-stop for months and it seems like no real software is coming out of it aside from pretty basic web gui interfaces for API plugins. is that what people are genuinely excited about?

What is your point exactly. He seemed very concerned about the issue, he said he did not tolerate the coin talks.

What else would he or anyone do if someone is tokenizing your product and you have no control over it?

I just made the observation that whoever was behind it, it ultimately benefited the author in reaching this outcome.

A lot of the functionality I'm not using because of security concerns, but a lot of the magic comes down to just having a platform for orchestrating AI agents. It's honestly nice just for simple sysadmin stuff "run this cron job and text me a tl;dr if anything goes wrong" or simple personal assistant tasks like"remind me if anyone messaged me a question in the last 3 days and I haven't answered".

It's also cool having the ability to dispatch tasks to dumber agents running on the GPU vs smarter (but costlier) ones in the cloud

but why?

Because it's the easiest way for me to accomplish those tasks (but open to suggestions if you have any)

I mean why use agents at all? What do you benefit?

“Just” is doing some heavy lifting here.

How do you know it was for less than a billion?

The sentence ended with a question mark.

I don't know the answer, but considering Meta (known for 100m+ offers) was in the rumors, and he mentions multiple labs (and many investors), and all the hype around openclaw ... I can easily see 9 figure, and would not be surprised by 1b+ "signing bonus", perhaps in the equivalent number of OpenAI shares.

... Why would they pay 9 figures? It's not like Openclaw required specialized PhD-level knowledge held by <1000 people in the world to build, and that's what Meta and the other AI labs are paying ludicrous salaries for. Openclaw is a cool project and demonstrates good product design in the AI world, but by no means is a great product manager worth 1 billion dollars.

1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter;

2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google

3) the top paid people in this world are not phds

4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)

5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.

need I continue?

please do continue. I like your points.

> 1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter;

Again, Peter is a good/great AI product manager but I don't see any distinguishing skills worth a billion dollars there. There's only one Openclaw but it's also been a few weeks since it came into existence? Openclaw clones will exist soon enough, and the community is WAY too small to be worth anything (unlike, say, Instagram/Whatsapp before being acquired by Facebook)

> 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google

True, but not worth $100 million dollars - $1 billion dollars

> 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds

The people getting massive compensation offers from AI companies are all AI-adjacent PhDs or people with otherwise rare and specialized knowledge. This is unrelated to people who have massive compensation due to being at AI companies early. And if we're talking about the world in general, yes the best thing to do to be rich is own real estate and assets and extract rent, but that has nothing to do with this compensation offer

> 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)

Investments have a probable ROI, what's the ROI on a product manager?

> 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.

99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw, it's extremely niche right now.

Math is fun!

There are roughly 8.1 billion humans, so 99.999999% (8 nines) of the world is 81 people. There were way more than 81 people at the OpenClaw hackathon at the Frontier Tower in San Francisco, so at least that much of humanity has heard of OpenClaw. If we guess 810 people know about OpenClaw, then it means that 99.99999% (7 nines) of humanity have not heard of OpenClaw.

If we take it down to 6 nines, then that's roughly 8,100 people having heard of OpenClaw, and that 99.9999% of humanity has not.

So I think you're wrong when you say "99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw". I'd guess it's probably around 99.9999% to 99.9999999% that hasn't heard of it. Definitely not 99.999999% though.

To preface, I don't claim he will absolutely get that much money - but I wouldn't be surprised.

On the topic of brand recognition, 0.000001% of the world is 80 people (give or take). OpenClaw has ~200k GitHub stars right now.

On a more serious note, the world doesn't matter: the investors, big tech ceos, analysts do. Cloudflare stock jumped 10% due to Clawdbot.

Hype is weird. AI hype, doubly so. And OpenAI are masters at playing the game.

Why would cloudflare stock jump due to clawdbot?

> Cloudflare Inc (NYSE:NET) shares rose more than 10% on Monday to $193.68, following a weekend surge in social media excitement around Clawdbot, an open-source AI agent built on Anthropic’s Claude. This jump comes despite the stock having fared poorly over the last month, according to InvestingPro data.

Source: https://www.investing.com/news/analyst-ratings/cloudflare-st...

(there are a few others)

Again, I'm not saying that it should rise, but that in a meme-stock era, for an ai-hype-driven market, it would not be surprising.

I guess OP meant https://blog.cloudflare.com/moltworker-self-hosted-ai-agent/ but that's a bit preposterous...

By that logic, was Alexandr Wang worth a billion or so?

he was worth 14B

Yeah, shows he is smart, in the current market state.

We're at the point in the cycle where if someone offers you decent money you take it.

It might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing

how is it a "startup" if all ip is open-source. Seems like openAi is just buying hype to keep riding their hype bubble a little longer, since they are in hot water on every other front (20Billion revenue vs 1 Trillion expenses and obligations, Sora 2 user retention dropping to 1% of users after 1 month of usage, dense competition, all actual real founding ml scientists having skipped the boat a long time ago).

I keep reading takes about OpenClaw being acquired, but even the TLDR at the top makes it clear that OpenClaw isn’t part of this move:

> tl;dr: I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.

I’m sure he got a very generous offer (congrats to him!) but all of the hot takes about OpenClaw being acquired are getting weird.

I literally had begun to wonder if OpenClaw had more of a future as a company than OpenAI

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