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Welcome to the Techbrew write home for Monday, February 16, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough. Today OpenClaw's creator is joining OpenAI, but the OpenClaw project lives on. The AI caused memory shortage might delay the next PlayStation. Is the Pentagon about to cut ties with Anthropic and Vitalik? Buterin is growing concerned with the prediction markets. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech Foreign. Peter Steinberger, the creator of Openclaw, is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. Openclaw itself will remain open source. Quoting the Verge, Sam Altman announced on X that Peter Steinberger, the man behind the trendy AI agent Openclaw, was joining OpenAI. He said that Steinberger has, quote, a lot of amazing ideas about getting AI agents to interact with each other, saying the future is going to be extremely multi agent. He also said that this ability for agents to work together will quickly become core to our product offerings. OpenClaw, previously known as Multbot and Claudebot, exploded on the scene earlier this year and became the darling of the tech world. Its rise was swift, but not without its bumps along the way. Earlier this month, researchers found over 400 malicious skills uploaded to Clawhub. It also launched Multbook, a social network where AI agents went to complain about their humans, debate the provability of consciousness, and discuss the need for a private place to exchange ideas. And then it was immediately infiltrated by humans. In a post on his personal site, Steinberger said that joining OpenAI would allow him to achieve his goal of bringing AI agents to the masses without the headaches of running a company. He explained, quote I could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company. And no, it's not really exciting for me. I'm a builder at heart. I did the whole creating a company game, already pouring 13 years of my life into it, and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large company. And teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone. End quote. And this is for from implicator AI quote Mark Zuckerberg needed 10 minutes. He was finishing code. Peter Steinberger had called Zuckerberg on WhatsApp without scheduling anything. I don't like calendar entries, he told Lex Friedman last week. Let's just call now. Zuckerberg asked for a brief pause, then picked up. The first 10 minutes devolved into an argument about whether Claude Code or Codex was the better programming tool. The CEO of a trillion dollar company squabbling with a solo developer from Vienna over IDE preferences. That was two weeks ago. Zuckerberg ran OpenCloud on his own machine afterward, gave feedback that was blunt and specific, calling features great or shit in real time, used it until it broke, and then sent notes on what to fix. Steinberger called it the biggest compliment because it shows they actually care about it. Steinberger has been losing money on OpenClaw since November, 10,000 to $20,000 a month by his own count. He routes sponsorship revenue to the developers who maintain his dependencies rather than keeping it. The project hit 196,000 GitHub stars and pulled 2 million visitors in a single week, while its creator subsidized everything from saving. He doesn't need the money. He spent 13 years building PSPDFKit into a PDF tool company worth over $100 million before selling it to Insight Partners. Three years of what he described as soul searching followed therapy. Ayahuasca, 43 failed projects. Then Openclaw caught fire. His negotiating edge came from something no check could replicate. Both Meta and OpenAI made concrete offers reportedly valued in the billions. VCs lined up. Steinberger told Friedman he didn't care. I don't give an F were his exact words. When you've sold a company and your next project goes viral by accident, the dynamics flip completely. He wasn't selling. They were auditioning. Steinberger told a Y Combinator podcast this month that AGI is the wrong goal. What can one human actually achieve? Do you think one human being could make an iPhone? Or one human being could go to space? He said. As a group, we specialize. As a larger society, we specialize even more. His vision runs on specialized agents collaborating, not one God model that handles everything. OpenAI's entire corporate identity rests on achieving artificial general intelligence. The name says it. So does the $500 billion valuation. Steinberger just joined a company whose state admission he publicly rejects. Ignore the ideology for a second. The logistics explain everything. Steinberger does not want to run a company. 13 years of it was enough. He wants to build agents everyone can use. That means compute APIs and 300 million people already opening ChatGPT every week. This is pragmatism. Dressed as alignment, Meta offered something different, more personal. In fact, Zuckerberg's hands on engagement impressed Steinberger. Steinberger recounted it on Fried show, acting out the reactions. Mark basically, oh this is great. Oh this is shit. Oh it needs to change this. He noted the contrast with OpenAI. I didn't get the same on the OpenAI side. He chose OpenAI anyway. Zuckerberg codes gives real feedback and clearly cares. None of that ships a product to hundreds of millions of users. For a builder who wants reach without management overhead, that settled it. Steinberger drew the comparison himself. Openclaw would follow the Chrome and Chromium model. A foundation to hold the open source project, a corporate partner to build the commercial version. I think this is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs, he told Friedman. He's describing a pattern with a known ending. Google open source Chromium Chrome is what everyone downloads. Android AOSP is open. Google's Android with play services runs the planet. MySQL went to Oracle. The community forked it into MariaDB. MariaDB survives. MySQL still owns the market. Every foundation arrangement in tech follows the same gravitational pull. The corporate version gets full time engineers, marketing, distribution and the daily attention of the person who created the project. The open source twin gets volunteers and good intentions. Gravity always wins. End quote. AI sources tell Bloomberg that Sony is considering pushing back the debut of its next generation PlayStation console to 2028 or even 20 because of the AI boom fueling huge memory chip shortages. Sony is now considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029, according to people familiar with the company's thinking. That would be a major upset to a carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations. Close rival Nintendo, which contributed to the surplus demand in 2025 after its new Switch 2 console drove storage card purchases, is also contemplating raising the price of that device in 2026, people familiar with its plan said. Sony and Nintendo representatives didn't respond to requests for comment. Since the start of 2026, Tesla, Apple and a dozen other major corporations have signaled that the shortage of dram, or dynamic random access memory, the fundamental building block of almost all technology, will constrain production. Tim Cook warned it will compress iPhone margins. Micron Technology called the bottleneck unprecedented. Elon Musk got to the nature of the problem when he declared, tesla is going to have to build its own memory fabrication plant. We've got two hit the chip wall or make a fab, he said in late January. The resulting price spikes are starting to look a bit like the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation. The cost of one type of dram soared 75% from December to January, accelerating price hikes throughout the holiday quarter. A growing number of retailers and middlemen are changing their prices every day. Ramageddon is the term some use to describe what's coming. We stand at the cusp of something that is bigger than anything we faced before, tim Archer, chief executive officer of chip equipment supplier Lam Research, said at a conference in South Korea this month. What is ahead of us between now and the end of this decade in terms of demand is bigger than anything we've seen in the past and in fact will overwhelm all other sources of demand. What's worrying about the trend is that prices are soaring and supplies are running dry even before the AI giants really get going with their data center construction plans, Alphabet and Amazon just announced plans for a construction blitz this year that could reach $185 to $200 billion, respectively. More money than any company in history has poured into capital expenditures in a single year. Mark Lee, a Bernstein analyst who tracks the semiconductor industry, warns that memory chip prices are going parabolic. While that will bring lavish profits to Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, the rest of the electronics sector will pay a painful price in the months ahead. Right now we're in the middle of a storm that we are dealing with hour by hour and day by day, steiner Sans Toby, CEO of Norwegian IT firm ETA Asa, told analysts in February. It's actually wiser to hold off doing business today, as prices are almost certain to be higher tomorrow, said Su Yong Hwan, who runs three DIY PC shops in Seoul and frequently does business with stalls at Sunan Plaza. Unless Steve Jobs rises from the dead to declare that AI is nothing but a bubble, this trend is likely to persist for some time, he said.