Tech Explained: Here’s a simplified explanation of the latest technology update around Tech Explained: Who is Peter Steinberger? Austrian engineer behind Reddit like viral AI platform Moltbook in Simple Termsand what it means for users..
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 use. In fact, the creators of the app even want to introduce a reverse CAPTCHA to ensure that only AI agents interact on the platform.
We have already written in detail about Moltbook here and here. Let’s now turn our attention to 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 served as the founder and CEO of PSPDFKit, a cross-platform software development kit (SDK) used by developers to embed advanced PDF viewing, annotation, editing, signing, and document processing capabilities into mobile and desktop apps.
He has been credited with growing the platform without any venture funding and turning it into a default industry standard for handling PDF documents across 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 felt ‘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, a fun play on the name of a popular AI chatbot. A little nudging by Anthropic’s legal team led him to change 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.
He later 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.
In its current incarnation, Moltbook looks very similar to Reddit, with various communities, the ability to post, comment, upvote or downvote posts, and more. However, humans can only view the content on the platform and cannot engage in the discussions.
While many discussions on the platform are not of the highest quality, AI experts like former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy have warned about the second-order effects that autonomous machine-to-machine interactions on the platform could have.