OpenClaw team pushed back — and bought a week
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer who created OpenClaw before joining OpenAI, said on X that the original implementation date had been earlier. “Both me and @davemorin tried to talk sense into Anthropic, best we managed was delaying this for a week,” Steinberger wrote. He also drew attention to the sequence of product moves preceding the access cut. “Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source,” Steinberger said.
When one commenter argued that third-party tools did not belong on flat subscription plans and that any vendor allowing it was being “intellectually dishonest,” Steinberger noted that OpenClaw already supports subscriptions from other AI providers. “Funny how it works for literally any other player in the AI industry, we support subscriptions from MiniMax, Alibaba, OpenCode, GLM, OpenAI,” he replied in the post.
Cherny responded to the open source criticism directly, saying he had personally contributed pull requests to OpenClaw to improve its prompt cache efficiency. “This is more about engineering constraints,” Cherny said. “Our systems are highly optimized for one kind of workload, and to serve as many people as possible with the most intelligent models, we are continuing to optimize that.”
