OpenClaw founder spends $1.3 million in a month running 100 AI coding agents
Peter Steinberger, the founder of the open-source coding agent OpenClaw and now an engineer at OpenAI, published a screenshot of his team's 30-day OpenAI API dashboard, showing $1,305,088.81 in usage charges across 603 billion tokens and 7.6 million requests.
The bill was generated by approximately 100 Codex instances running continuously in the cloud, managed by a team of three people, and is being covered by OpenAI in full.
The agents performs a broad set of engineering tasks autonomously. Some agents review pull requests on OpenClaw, others scan recent commits for security vulnerabilities, and others deduplicate GitHub issues, write fixes, and open replacement pull requests. A separate set monitors performance benchmarks and reports regressions into the team's Discord channel.
This is the most concrete public data point yet on the cost of autonomous AI-assisted software development at scale.