Peter Steinberger, creator of the open-source AI agent OpenClaw, says he spent about $10M on AI tokens last month.
Steinberger, who now works at OpenAI, made the estimate on stage at Cloudflare's Connect conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, according to reporting from the event. Tokens are the units AI companies use to meter and charge for their models, roughly chunks of text going in and coming out. The source gives one number and no breakdown. It does not say which models he used, what the spend produced, or who paid the bill.
The figure is an on-stage estimate, so treat it as a rough marker rather than an audited cost. Even so, the scale is worth pausing on. A consumer chatbot subscription typically runs about $20 a month, so $10M is the equivalent of 500,000 of those, billed to one person's projects.
The likely explanation is the kind of software he builds. An agent does not answer one question and stop. It plans, calls a model, reads the result, and calls again, often many times per task. Usage that would be trivial in a chat window compounds quickly when software is the one asking.
The open question is who absorbs costs like this. If the spend sits inside his employer's walls, it is closer to a research budget than a market price. If it does not, it is a sharper signal of what heavy agent use costs at the frontier.