OpenClaw creator says he spent $10 million in tokens last month

Peter Steinberger, member of technical staff at OpenAI and the creator of OpenClaw, estimates that he spent around $10 million in tokens running AI workloads last month. But don't feel bad for him, because it's all coming out of investors' pockets.

He made this admission at the Cloudflare Connect 2026 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, in a conversation with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht.

Knecht previously observed that Steinberger has acknowledged having "a virtually unlimited token budget, which not all of us in the room have."

Responding to the audible surprise rising from the audience, Steinberger added, "What people don't always understand is not all of that is useful."

That only amplified the murmuring, perhaps not the effect he had been after. Meanwhile, his employer, OpenAI, is reportedly trying to " accelerate funding " ahead of rival Anthropic's expected IPO.

Steinberger's subsequent musing about his preferred way of working failed to recognize Knecht's acknowledgement of financial limitations.

"I feel like …