OpenAI's Steinberger puts last month's token spend near $10 million.

Peter Steinberger, the creator of the open-source AI agent OpenClaw and a member of technical staff at OpenAI, estimates that he spent around $10 million in tokens running AI workloads last month. Tokens are the units AI companies use to charge for the text a model reads and writes. The Register reported on 21 October 2026 that Steinberger made the estimate on stage at Cloudflare Connect 2026 in San Francisco, in a conversation with Cloudflare's chief technology officer, Dane Knecht. The Register wrote that the money is "all coming out of investors' pockets." Steinberger added a caveat: "What people don't always understand is not all of that is useful."

**What Was Said on Stage**

Knecht noted that Steinberger has acknowledged having "a virtually unlimited token budget, which not all of us in the room have," according to The Register. Responding to the audience's surprise, Steinberger said: "What people don't always understand is not all of that is useful."

Steinberger also addressed infrastructure. "I feel like the main challenge a lot of people still have is that our infrastructure structure hasn't really caught up yet," he said. "Like why is this still using my computer? Shouldn't this all be in the cloud?"

Asked whether everyone would run hundreds of agents within a few years, he said: "I think everyone will have some sort of intelligence that runs and thinks and helps them throughout the day or even predicts what could help you in the future."

**The Earlier Figure From May**

The Decoder reported on 16 May 2026 that the OpenAI API bill reached $1.3 million over 30 days, for 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests. The top model was GPT-5.5, and, in the Decoder's words, "OpenAI picks up the tab." By our arithmetic, the roughly $10 million estimate for last month is about 7.7 times that bill. The comparison is not like-for-like: one figure is a reported bill and the other is a spoken estimate. The average cost on the May bill works out to about $2.16 per million tokens.

Steinberger joined OpenAI in February, The Next Web reported, and has spoken about token use since. At a June meetup in San Francisco, The Next Web quoted him saying: "Last year I was constrained by token. Now I fixed that by joining OpenAI." At Y Combinator's Startup School in August, asked when agents will run all the time on their own, he said: "That's not so much a tech problem. It's more a token problem."

**Agents Checking Agents**

Knecht also asked how to decide what data to give an agent. Steinberger said the answer partly depends on the model, because much of a model's behavior is not governed by the harness, the code that wraps the model, The Register reported. "A lot of decisions that I built into OpenClaw early on now can change because the models are so much better," he said.

Even with prompt-injection risks reduced, Steinberger said, "you might not want to give your agent all the permissions." His suggestion was a second agent that grants permissions: "You want to have another agent that can give it permissions or not and then this agent has to negotiate with another agent."

On open source, he said pull requests should show how the code was reached. "If I see your thoughts, how you got from A to B, my trust in the output is way higher than if you just throw the finished work across the fence," he said, according to The Register.

**Why It Matters for Agent Budgets**

The Next Web set the figure against Accenture, which it reported caps its staff's Claude spending at $29 a month. By our arithmetic, $10 million over a 30-day month is roughly $330,000 a day. As we read it, Steinberger's caveat that not all of the spend is useful points to the measure that matters when companies budget for agents: what the spend finished, not how many tokens it used.

**Connecting the Coverage**

Earlier today, our Claude Max limits piece reported SemiAnalysis measurements showing that one Max 20x account received a 20% smaller weekly budget than another on the same plan. Our harness scaling piece covered a paper in which training an agent across 18 harness setups raised a small open model's average score from 29.81 to 39.04. What's new is that an OpenAI member of technical staff puts one month of AI workloads at about $10 million in tokens.

**The Structural Read**

As we read it, the figure measures access more than output. Knecht described "a virtually unlimited token budget, which not all of us in the room have," and The Register wrote that the cost comes out of investors' pockets.

As we read it, the gap between spend and useful work is the planning variable. Steinberger said not all of that spend is useful, which is the difference between tokens bought and tasks finished.

As we read it, the harness is moving into the model. Steinberger said many decisions built into OpenClaw early on can now change because the models are so much better, and he suggested a second agent that grants or withholds permissions.

**Three Implications**

*For AI labs:* The Decoder reported in May that OpenAI picks up the tab for the API bill. As we read it, the lab is paying for heavy agent use by its own staff.

*For companies budgeting for agents:* The Next Web reported that Accenture caps staff Claude spending at $29 a month. By our arithmetic, about $10 million a month is roughly $330,000 a day.

*For agent builders:* Steinberger said "you might not want to give your agent all the permissions" and described an agent that grants permissions to another agent.

**The Business Engineer Lens**

This story maps onto the Business Engineer framework in *The Subsidized AGI Economy*. The framework argues: "The negative margin is not a leak. It is a procurement budget. The labs are not pricing the product; they are buying an input that is not for sale anywhere else: agentic workload signal at the frontier of difficulty."

As we read it, Steinberger's month fits that frame: an OpenAI staff member running agent workloads at about $10 million of tokens, a cost that The Register says investors carry. The framework was published in June 2026 and does not discuss Steinberger or this talk.

**What Is Not Established**

The $10 million is Steinberger's spoken estimate as reported by The Register, not a published bill. The reports we read do not break it down by model, provider or task. The Register says the cost falls on investors, and The Decoder said in May that OpenAI picks up the tab, but the reports do not say how much of last month's spend was billed at list prices.

We read the free opening sections of The Register, The Next Web and The Decoder's coverage. We did not contact Steinberger, OpenAI or Cloudflare. Nothing here is investment advice.