OpenClaw creator says he spent $10 million in tokens last month
Good thing it's somebody else's money
OpenClaw's creator, Peter Steinberger, disclosed spending approximately $10 million on AI tokens in a recent month during a Cloudflare Connect 2026 conference in San Francisco. Steinberger, an engineer at OpenAI, acknowledged that not all of this spending would yield useful outcomes. OpenAI is reportedly accelerating funding in anticipation of Anthropic's anticipated IPO.
Steinberger expressed his belief that the main challenge with AI infrastructure is the lack of a cloud-like system, which he currently uses. He also questioned whether the current open source model is at its peak or on the brink of decline due to frustration with AI sloppiness. Steinberger believes that the handling of pull requests needs to change due to the lack of explanation of the reasoning behind proposed changes.
He doubts that everyone would run hundreds of AI agents in the future, but rather that everyone will have some form of intelligent assistance. The discussion then turned to trust and how to determine what data to provide to an agent. Steinberger suggested using an authorized agent to manage permissions, stating that multiple systems working together can increase trust in AI interactions.
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