TED Talks Daily - How I created OpenClaw, the viral AI agent | Peter Steinberger

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger takes us back to the transformative moment he let his AI agent loose on the internet, igniting one of the world's fastest-growing open-source projects. He makes a fascinating (and slightly unnerving) case that agents are a real shift, not just better versions of chatbots, and explores how they might reshape your ability to work, create and build. "The lobster is loose, and it's not going back into the tank," he says. (Followed by a brief Q&A with TED Chairman Chris Anderson)Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Though I forgot, I built a system to be resilient. So while I was walking to the bedroom, the agent happily booted up again and talked to everyone in the world. The next morning, I woke up over 800 messages. I panicked. I pulled the plug. I read every single message just to see if the agent leaked my private life.

Nothing happened, but it could have. That's OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, who created the wildly popular AI agent platform in late 2025. In his talk, he takes us back to this transformative moment where he let his AI agent loose on the internet, igniting one of the world's fastest growing open source projects. He makes a fascinating and slightly unnerving case that agents are a real shift, not just better versions of chatbots, and explores how they might reshaping. shape your ability to work, create, and build. What we need in the future is more people spending more time with the eye to better understand

how powerful and transformative this technology really is. Stick around afterwards. His talk is followed by a brief Q&A with Ted Chairman Chris Anderson. That's coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day. What's open claw? I've been programming since I was 14. Building software felt like playing a video game. I couldn't stop until I did.

I created a company. I poured a decade of my life into it. No venture capital, every weekend. And then I sold the dream. And I felt absolutely nice. For three years, I was wondering. Did Sarah B traveled? I changed countries twice.

Nothing clicked. You know, I wake up every morning with everything I was supposed to want and no reason to be out of bed. And then, in early 2025, I tried an experiment, I wanted to see what these new AI coding agents are all about. And I had what I can only describe as a holy shit moment.

The boilerplate, the plumbing, all the boring parts that was software development, AI could do all of it. The bottleneck is no longer typing. It's sinking. And sinking was the part I did. I did 25 years. Building software, felt like playing a video game again.

I was back. I built 44 projects in just a few months. And the latest one was a WhatsApp bot. I put it on my computer. It talks through the apps that you already know. And then I took it on a trip to Marrakesh. You know, just to navigate around, to find restaurants, do translations.

And at first, it didn't really feel right. It felt too much like a tool, not like a friend. You know, too many bullet points, too many tables. So I told it, because those modern models, they are so smart, they know what WhatsApp is, they know how people talk. I just had to tell it. And then it felt right. And you know how you talk to friends at some point?

I was walking around, and I was sending it a voice message. And then I froze because I actually didn't build voice in there. I had a support for images, yeah, but even that took hours. So I was looking at the typing indicator, and then the agent responded. And I very vividly remember this situation where I was standing there, and I was like, how did you do that?

And the agent replied, I'm not kidding you, the mad lad figured it out on its own. And then it walked me through every single step, how it got a message from me, but there was no file ending, so it inspected the file, it found that it was audio, but a weird format, so it converted it. And then it was looking for something to translate the audio,

but I didn't have it installed, but then it found an open-E-I key, it sent a whole thing to the server, it got it back, and then it replied. All of that in nine seconds. Can you imagine? I didn't build any of that. For me, this was the moment where I thought, this is something new. This is not a chatbot.

Chatbots give up. Agents improvise. And you know, I was sold. I wanted to share this. I wanted to tell people on Twitter. And nobody really got it. It's almost like you have to experience an agent. It's kind of hard to explain.

Took me a few weeks. And then I did something stupid. Remember, this agent by default can do anything that you can do on your computer. So obviously, I put it in a public discord and I invited random people. And I was looking at it the whole night. People were talking with it,

people were having fun with it, people tried to hack it. And when my eyes were like, falling off almost, I exited the process and I went to bed. Though I forgot, I built a system to be resilient. So while I was walking to the bedroom,

the agent happily put it up again and talked to everyone in the world. The next morning I woke up over 800 messages. I panicked. I pulled a plug. I read every single message. Just to see if the agent leaked my private life, nothing happened, but it could have.

But that was the moment where it went viral. Today, the project is called OpenClaw. It's pretty much the fastest growing open source project. Its mascot is a lobster. It claws into your machine. Jensen Huang calls it the operating system for personal AI. I was not ready. You know, when something blows up like this, everything explodes.

hundreds of messages, reporters calling me in the middle of the night, security vulnerabilities, and then the AI company, whose model most of my users loved, sent me a trademark claim. I had to rename the whole thing while it was taking off. You know?

They even tried to push me away from the lobster. Like I was staring at the message. It was like, it's not even the same animal. And then they also cut off the model most of my users loved. You know, first the name, then the lobster, then the model. I was that close of just deleting the whole thing. But then I learned what people are building with it. So at Claircon in Vienna, because yes, we have conferences already,

and people were lobster headbands. I met Stefan and his 60-year-old dad Gerhard, a beer sommelier who never wrote a single line of code. They connected open claw via Bluetooth, sent it one prompt, and the agent did the whole 90-minute brew, temperature rams, hop additions, everything. And then they were like, what are we doing with all this beer?

And the agent was, let's make a website. So they built a website, and then they added payments, and now they have a real product. And almost all of it was just done via the phone. In China, installing open claw is called Raising Lobsters. Thousands of people were lining up at the Tencent office in Shenzhen to get their lobster installed. Shenzhen even gives out subsidies

for people running businesses on OpenClaw. Now, if you install OpenClaw on your work machine, at least with the default settings, you might get fired. And then I met an entrepreneur in China who showed me a spreadsheet. Every employee, every day, one task automated by OpenClaw.

If you missed too many days, you're fired. So, fired for using it, fired for not using it. After Marrakesh, I thought, this is incredible. And it's also a little bit scary. How can we make it more scary? So I added a new feature, a heartbeat.

You know, by default, would only wake up when you send it a prompt. With the heartbeat, the agent would just wake up periodically. Check your emails, check your calendar, follow-up on Luz-Sense. My initial prompt was simply, surprise me. And yes, that's kind of as scary as it sounds.

So no large company would ship something like that. But I'm a random builder from Austria. I don't have a legal department. I built this sandbox, this sandcastle for me, and I made it open source, so other people could play with it, and other people could raise their imagination. Imagine putting an agent into a meeting.

Not for notes. We figured that out. A bidirectional model that can listen and hear at the same time. Somebody mentions a statistic, a sub-agent can spin off and check it for you. A decision is made, the agent can send a follow-up before the meeting even ends. In the future, we're not just going to have one agent. You might have your work agent, your personal claw, maybe one for health, maybe one for a relationship.

And they all should work together in a secure way. because how did humanity level up by specializing and collaborating? And agents are about to do the same. Imagine a company, a small business that has 10 agents that all specialized taking over various parts of the business. We don't even have a name for what that might become, but we're about to find out. So I created the open company.

Clare Foundation, a nonprofit, open source, forever. Because what OpenClau did for many people was, it moved AI from this scary, nebulous thing into something that is fun and useful, and maybe a bit weird, you know, lobsters and headbands and beer businesses. Because what we need in the future is, more people spending more time with the eye to better understand how powerful and transformative

this technology really is. In New York at Claircon, yes, you're everywhere now. There were thousands of people that were discussing what their lobster did this week. A retiree in Shenzhen who automated their groceries. A teenager in Sao Paulo who built a tutoring business on OpenClaw, Gerhard and his beer machine. None of them are programmers.

All of them are builders. Because that's the real transformation. It's not a technology, it's the access. Agents change who can build things, and that door is not closing again. Because when you can prompt a prototype into existence in one hour, anything is possible, the next breakthrough can come from anyone, any country, any cafe.

When even a burned-out founder staring at the screen, wondering if his spark is gone, can do something like that. It's not gone. It's just waiting. The lobster is loose and it's not going back into the tank. Thank you very much.

Come here. I mean, I think I want to say something personal to you with love. But truth, you really terrify me. I'm serious. If Hollywood was to ever make a movie in which humanity opened Pandora box and everything went crazy.

But you seriously could be cast as the star character. Because the story we're told is that AI researchers are doing all this great stuff, but they're taking all these great efforts to ensure safety and make sure nothing bad could happen. You take glee in seeing what might happen if you just put it out there. Like, is any part of you feeling that that's a little bit reckless? I wouldn't say so. I see my work as a...

I see it as a window into the future. Like, in the very beginning, there were all these scary moments. Now we have proper security layers. You can have your sandbox. You can put your lobster into a very small, tiny box. and really control what it can do. There's still some issues that we need to figure out, but the fact that so many people want this now

will help to figure this out much faster. So I'm glad you mentioned the security last. I mean, you're making a huge bet on human ingenuity using this. This is an incredible tool that suddenly can maximize the power of what any human can do. Is that how many people in your community are taking the safety issue seriously

and want to use OpenClaw, for example, to find smarter ways? Just checking whether anything might be going wrong and giving an early alarm to someone or something like that? Most people are not as reckless of, number one, putting it into a public discord. Strongly don't recommend.

Number two, I think I single-handedly increased Mac minisage, by multiple percent. So most people give it their own little Mac Mini. Mine's a little princess, mine got a Mac Studio, it calls it the castle. And that greatly reduces the actual risk, because you can only access what's on that computer, and maybe all your pictures are not there.

Well, definitely, if humanity goes down, I'll be very grateful for at least the rise in Mac Mini Sales. For a period of John. You are amazing. You are amazing. And I think you're actually right at the cutting edge of whether AI is going to be the biggest boon ever or possibly a serious problem.

And help us get smarter on how to do this the right way because it is absolutely incredible what you've built. Thank you for sharing so much. Thank you. That was Peter Steinberger at TED 2026. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today.

Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.