OpenClaw Timeline Update: From Clawdbot to Independent Foundation After OpenAI Acqui-Hire (Nov 2025 – Mar 2026)
{{OpenClaw}} went through three names — Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw — in under three months as {{Anthropic}} pursued trademark complaints, reached 247,000 GitHub stars by March 2026, and continued independently after {{OpenAI}} acqui-hired creator {{Peter Steinberger}} in February 2026 without buying the codebase.
OpenClaw, the third-party coding-agent harness whose lockout from Anthropic's API became a flashpoint in April 2026, has a compressed naming history worth recording for context. The project was released in November 2025 by Peter Steinberger — formerly CEO of PSPDFKit, with roughly 13 years building developer-tools companies — under the name **Clawdbot**. Anthropic filed trademark complaints citing similarity to Claude, and on January 27, 2026 the project was renamed **Moltbot**. Further trademark issues surfaced almost immediately; three days later the project was renamed again to **OpenClaw**, the name it still carries. Growth was unusually rapid for a developer tool: by March 2, 2026 the GitHub repository had reached approximately 247,000 stars and 47,700 forks. Comparable harnesses typically take years to reach those numbers; OpenClaw did it in roughly three months, which is one reason Anthropic's eventual move against it (legal threats, API access restrictions) drew so much attention. On February 15, 2026 OpenAI announced an acqui-hire of Peter Steinberger personally. Critically, OpenAI did **not** acquire the OpenClaw codebase or its intellectual property. The project was transferred to an independent foundation with OpenAI providing financial sponsorship but no ownership stake. This structure was chosen specifically so that OpenClaw could continue interoperating with multiple model providers — including Anthropic, when permitted — rather than becoming a first-party OpenAI tool. The foundation structure is also why the April 2026 Anthropic harness lockout hit OpenClaw users specifically rather than being routed around by OpenAI corporate.