Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
The real story here is worse than a fumble. It’s a three-step own goal.
January 9: Anthropic locks Claude Code OAuth tokens, killing every third-party tool that built on Claude subscriptions. OpenClaw, which recommended Claude Opus 4.5 as its default model, wakes up to a broken integration. No warning. No partner outreach.
January 27: Anthropic’s legal team sends the cease-and-desist over “Clawdbot” sounding too similar to “Claude.” Steinberger complies at 5 AM on a Discord call. During the 10-second window where he releases the old GitHub and X handles, crypto scammers hijack both accounts and run a $16M pump-and-dump scheme. The chaos reflects on the entire Claude ecosystem.
February 15: Steinberger announces he’s joining OpenAI.
So Anthropic had the fastest-growing open source project in AI history (145K+ GitHub stars, 2 million visitors in a single week), built by a guy who sold his last company for ~€100M, whose tool literally recommended Claude as the default model to millions of new users.
Their response was to cut off his API access and send lawyers.
Steinberger spent last week in San Francisco meeting with every major lab. He explicitly said he could have built OpenClaw into a massive company but chose OpenAI because he wanted “the fastest way to bring this to everyone.” Meanwhile OpenClaw has already spread to China, with Baidu planning direct integration into its main app.
This is a project that was essentially a free distribution channel for Claude. Millions of developers installing a tool that defaults to your model. The growth marketing team at Anthropic should have been sending gift baskets, not legal notices.
Sam Altman just got handed an open-source agent framework with global distribution and a brilliant founder, because Anthropic’s legal department moved faster than their partnerships team.