--- title: "Peter Steinberger's 100 AI agents racked up $1.3 million in OpenAI tokens in 30 days building OpenClaw" url: https://daily.dev/posts/peter-steinberger-s-100-ai-agents-racked-up-1-3-million-in-openai-tokens-in-30-days-building-opencl-rct4ypy2y source_url: https://thenextweb.com/news/openclaw-peter-steinberger-1-3-million-openai-token-bill type: article source: "The Next Web" published: 2026-05-18T19:47:26.254Z updated: 2026-05-22T09:52:34.677Z tags: ["ai-agents", "openclaw", "openai-codex"] reading_time: 6 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Peter Steinberger's 100 AI agents racked up $1.3 million in OpenAI tokens in 30 days building OpenClaw **[The Next Web](https://daily.dev/sources/tnw)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw and OpenAI engineer, ran 100 Codex instances simultaneously for 30 days, generating a $1.3 million API bill covering 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests. The cost is covered by OpenAI as a research investment. His three-person team uses these agents to autonomously review PRs, scan for security vulnerabilities, deduplicate issues, write fixes, and even attend meetings. Disabling 'Fast Mode' would reduce costs to ~$300,000/month. The figures provide the most concrete public data point on autonomous AI coding economics: roughly $13,000 per agent per month at full speed, or ~$3,000 optimized. The disclosure highlights the unsustainable gap between flat-rate subscription pricing and actual compute demands of autonomous agent fleets. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [AI's Economics Don't Make Sense \[Ad Free\]](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-s-economics-don-t-make-sense-ad-free--tzsh6lout) · Where's Your Ed At · 7 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI Agent Token Costs: How to Cut Your Bill by 60-80%](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-agent-token-costs-how-to-cut-your-bill-by-60-80--nglqddiuw) · Alex CloudStar · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit](https://daily.dev/posts/i-think-anthropic-and-openai-have-found-product-market-fit-azovmehbd) · Simon Willison · 4 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#openclaw](https://daily.dev/tags/openclaw), [#openai-codex](https://daily.dev/tags/openai-codex) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/peter-steinberger-s-100-ai-agents-racked-up-1-3-million-in-openai-tokens-in-30-days-building-opencl-rct4ypy2y)