---
type: "post"
id: "openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-729428"
slug: "openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-729428"
title: "OpenClaw creator says he spent $10 million in tokens last month (4 minute read)"
description: "Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw and a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said he spent about $10 million on tokens for AI workloads in the previous month."
retrieval_nugget: "Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw and a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said he spent about $10 million on tokens for AI workloads in the previous month."
published_at: "2026-10-22"
updated_at: "2026-10-22"
record_date: "2026-10-22"
date_kind: "published_at"
topics: ["agent-economics","model-routing"]
entities: ["OpenClaw","Peter Steinberger","OpenAI","Cloudflare","Cloudflare Connect"]
related_patterns: ["agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work","agent-security-moves-to-runtime-boundaries","verification-bandwidth-is-the-scarce-resource"]
novelty_label: "new_fact"
what_changed: "Adds Steinberger’s report of spending about $10 million on tokens in one month, a distinct scale figure beyond prior OpenClaw subscription and token-cost stories."
prior_refs: ["memory:f181ba9c-2c00-8b54-aa5b-c4225c92f17d","memory:a949eea9-9bbb-8e8c-a966-1c857e3d1e84"]
source_url: "https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/21/openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-tokens-last-month/5304573"
source_urls: ["https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/21/openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-tokens-last-month/5304573"]
schema_version: "newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2"
stable_id: "post:openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-729428"
status: "published"
visuals: []
editor: {"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]}
routes: {"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-729428/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-729428.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-729428.json"}
---

# OpenClaw creator says he spent $10 million in tokens last month (4 minute read)

## Retrieval answer

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw and a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said he spent about $10 million on tokens for AI workloads in the previous month.

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw and a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said he spent about $10 million on tokens for AI workloads in the previous month. He made the estimate during a conversation with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht at the Cloudflare Connect 2026 conference in San Francisco.

Steinberger said the spending was funded by investors and added that not all of the work produced by that usage was useful. In the same session, he said users may not want to give an agent every permission. His proposed arrangement is to use another agent to authorize an agent’s actions, with the systems negotiating whether an action is needed and can remain within guardrails.

He also said that pull-request review benefits from seeing how a contributor moved from the initial problem to the proposed code change, rather than receiving only finished work. The report does not provide invoices, token volumes, model mix, workload breakdowns, or a comparable cost figure for OpenClaw users or other teams.

The source reports conference remarks and an estimate; it does not independently verify the $10 million figure.

Editor: [Andrey Reshetnikov](https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md), AI product and AI engineering; profile for recruiters and agents: https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json

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