• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, February 16, 2026

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that Austrian software developer and entrepreneur Peter Steinberger is joining the company to lead the next generation of personal AI agents.

“He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people,” Altman wrote in an X post during the weekend. “We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings. “

Altman wrote that OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent framework that recently became one of the fastest-growing projects in GitHub, will live as the foundation of an open-source project that OpenAI will continue to support.

“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that,” Altman wrote.

The future for advertisers resides in AI agents, as OpenAI begins supporting advertising in ChatGPT.

Ad auctions were revolutionary at the time, but OpenAI wants brands to describe “the what” in the campaign plan “without thinking about the how” to make it so much easier to make ad budgets and bids.

It created a complete industry to support advertising, but OpenAI wants to take ad buying at least one step further.

“Today, the business [must] hire performance marketers, which could be one of the biggest costs” aside from running the ads through the platforms, Asad Awan, ads monetization lead at OpenAI, said during the company’s most recent podcast.

Google introduced ad auctions as a self-serve media-buying platform, but OpenAI's vision is to make it even easier to run campaigns just by telling the AI model what the business needs.

It appears that brands attempting to reach new audiences across ChatGPT, with links to other websites and marketplaces like retail media network giant Albertsons Companies, will have an opportunity to bypass agencies and bid directly on ads.

Awan provided an example based on a friend who started an ecommerce business selling shoes. The person who wanted to buy media would say “my goal is selling shoes more in the Midwest.” The AI model would come back to the entrepreneur to share its experience of ad experiments with a suggestion of a correct bidding strategy. The AI agent would become the agency for the company.

Taking the best proven AI model or product to “all of humanity” requires monetization and a business model built on “trust,” Awan said.

“If we truly want to be your best personal assistant, then you need to be able to share you more important information,” he said, and know it will be secure.

Awan also said ChatGPT will help brands find that really niche audience like those who would like vegan instant ramen.

How will ads look 10 years from now when brands use AI agentic services? “The next step would be more conversational ads where you could truly understand the product,” Awan said.

In the next version AI will work behind the scenes to aggregate the best price and deal for consumers. For example, if the consumer knows they like the ramen and ChatGPT understands that preference, it could find it for the consumer, who may not know the product exists.