Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw and a technical staff member at OpenAI, said at Cloudflare Connect 2026 that he spent around $10 million in tokens on AI workloads last month. The money did not come out of his own pocket, as he acknowledged the budget came from investors. The admission drew surprise from the audience, and Steinberger added that "not all of that is useful," which only fueled the murmuring.
Beyond the headline figure, Steinberger touched on recurring debates about infrastructure and cost. He questioned why AI workloads still rely on local machines, asking why everything is not in the cloud. Yet the Register notes that cloud-hosted agents can be expensive, and for anyone not burning venture capital, cost remains a real constraint. The episode illustrates how far AI token spending can scale when someone has effectively unlimited funding.
Steinberger also addressed trust and safety. He said pull request handling needs to change, because people rarely explain how they arrived at their code changes, and seeing the reasoning would increase trust. On agent permissions, he suggested not giving an agent full access; instead, another agent could grant or deny permissions, with the two agents negotiating. That two-agent system, he said, greatly increases his confidence before letting an agent operate freely.
The source is a single report from The Register, so there are no contrasting accounts. Its reporting also notes OpenAI is reportedly trying to accelerate funding ahead of Anthropic's expected IPO, but the article does not connect that directly to Steinberger's spending beyond the shared AI industry context.