Peter Steinberger, who built the OpenClaw agent project and now works at OpenAI as a member of technical staff, puts his token bill for last month at roughly $10 million. Tokens are the units AI providers charge by. The Register reports that none of it came from his own pocket: investors covered it.
He gave the figure on Wednesday at Cloudflare Connect 2026 in San Francisco, in conversation with Cloudflare chief technology officer Dane Knecht. Knecht noted that Steinberger has acknowledged having “a virtually unlimited token budget, which not all of us in the room have.” When the audience reacted audibly, Steinberger replied, “What people don’t always understand is not all of that is useful.”
That admission stands out. By his own account, some of the spending was wasted, and his budget lets him shrug that off. Most teams running agents pay for every unproductive run out of a budget someone will review.
Anyone sizing an agent budget against his example should treat $10 million a month as a ceiling set by unusual funding, and measure what share of their own token bill actually does useful work.
Reported by The Register on 21 October 2026.
