Who is Peter Steinberger? Austrian engineer behind Reddit like viral AI platform Moltbook

There is a new phenomenon that has captured attention in tech circles globally. It's a social media app by the name of Moltbook but the app is not meant for human usage and in fact the creators of the app even want to put in reverse captcha to make sure only AI Agents interact on the platform.

We have already written in detail about Moltbook, here and here. Let's now turn the attention towards the creator of Moltbook, Peter Steinberger.

Here is everything you need to know about the man behind the viral AI social media platform.

Who is Peter Steinberger?

Prior to his viral success with Openclaw, Steinberger has also served as the founder and CEO PSPDFKit which is a cross-platform software development kit (SDK) used by developers to embed advanced PDF viewing, annotation, editing, signing, and document processing capabilities in their mobile and desktop apps.

He has been credited for growing the platform without any venture funding and turning it into the default industry standard for handling PDF documents on mobile and web platforms.

As per a social media post reposted by Steinberger, he built 43 projects before OpenClaw went viral.

He told Peter Yang in an interaction that he was ‘lost’ after working on PSPDFKit for 13 years.

How did he start Openclaw?

Around two months ago, Steinberger says he ‘hacked together a weekend project’ which was first called Clawd as a fun play on the name of popular AI chatbot. A little nudging by Anthropic's legal team led to him changing the name of the platform first to Moltbot and later to OpenClaw.

In an interaction with WIRED, Steinberger said that he built Moltbot as an experimental way to feed images and other files directly into coding models.

Later he went on to develop Clawdbot into something more sophisticated with the intention that AI assistants should not mean handing over personal data to the cloud.

“But so far I have seen nobody really ask the question, ‘how can I have this and also own my data,’”Steinberger told the publication