Steinberger: Hackers failed to extract OpenClaw's private soul.md via prompt injection
Peter Steinberger · OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% Of Apps Will Disappear · Y Combinator · Feb 7, 2026 · at 17:27
Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, describes keeping his personal agent's soul.md file proprietary and notes that community prompt injection attacks on Discord have failed to leak it.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And the one file that's not open source is, like, my soul.md. So, even though my bot is in public Discord so far, nobody cracked that one file.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Peter Steinberger
Steinberger: 80% of consumer apps will disappear due to AI agents
“I think 80% of them are going away.”
Steinberger: Local AI agents are dramatically more capable than cloud AI
“I think my big difference is that it actually runs on your computer. Like everything I saw so far runs in the cloud. It's like, it can do a few things. If you run it on your computer, it can do every effing thing, right? So that's really more powerful.”
Steinberger: Coding AI model capabilities transfer directly to solving real-world tasks
“Coding is really like creative problem solving that maps very well back into the real world.
I think there's a huge correlation.
They need to be really good at creative problem solving, and that's a skill.
That's an abstract skill.
You can apply to code, but l…”
Steinberger: OpenClaw agent resisted prompt injections in a public Discord test
“I just created a Discord, And I just put my bot without any security restrictions in the public discord. And then people came in, and they interacted with it, and they saw me build the software with it, and they tried to prompt inject it, and hack it, and my a…”
Steinberger: Converting MCP tools to CLIs scales better than native integrations
“If you need to, you can use MCPs on the fly. You don't have to restart, unlike, unlike Codex or Cloud Code, where you actually have to restart the whole thing. I think it's way more elegant, and also scales way better.”