OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

This is quite a misleading title because this is the raw API cost, but he (obviously) has unlimited usage as an OpenAI employee. Moreover, if you use e.g. the $200 Codex sub, you get about ~$5k-$6k monthly API usage if you spend every week of your usage, if not more, which shows that the raw API cost is not how much it (likely) costs to OpenAI, unless they're subsidizing all this.

He did clarify that it was with fast mode. Without fast mode it'd "only" be $300k in raw API cost, or ~60 $200 Codex subscriptions.

Once you see how much crap they’re running to police the agents on the repo, you’ll ‘get’ the spend https://x.com/steipete/status/2055405041843052792

I won’t lie, if I had the access to this, I’d do the same exact thing.

And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr?

Doubtful lol, dudes killing the environment just for fun at this point.

Regardless of one’s opinion about AI, from a product perspective this seems somewhat similar to the dev using his 48gb ram machine and latest iphone to test an app that will be used by consumers with entry-level devices

After trying openclaw a bit myself, no wonder. Without the best models, capabilities drop significantly. And I guess he has a lot of automations and stuff, which explains the 19'000 daily spend. I hit my personal spend limit when it cost like 40 USD to get Google auth tokens working. Which is very complicated when you run openclaw on a vps. And it even broke like a week after. Maybe one could justify the 40usd if it would save my time instead. But I was babysitting openclaw doing it anyhow. So I actually double spend. Money plus time.

Btw, same frustration for me setting up signal, Whatsapp or slack...

It's a very peculiar way to flex.

Nobody here talking about what this represents for demand on these models, if these numbers aren’t made up.

One person using 600B tokens in a month. The most I’ve hit is around 500M tokens and I thought that was a huge amount.

We’re going to have some major compute shortages for a while

What does he have to show for it?

He used 600B tokens in 30 days.

I use more than 150B/month with just 15 codex accounts.

60 accounts is "just" $12,000/month. So Peter could "save" 100x by using monthly accounts.

Of course, he doesn't have to, as he works at OpenAI now.

The mentioned menu bar app is a MITM (man in the middle) and rightly discloses that it gets all your session creds and uses them, along with keychain and full disk access:

Privacy: Reuses existing provider sessions — OAuth, device flow, API keys, browser cookies, local files — so no passwords are stored.

macOS permissions: Full Disk Access for Safari cookies, Keychain access for cookie decryption and OAuth flows...

It's excellent this is disclosed as a reminder of how things work and the tradeoffs you're making to use it.

You can look at the output here https://github.com/steipete Sample commit from 5 minutes ago https://github.com/openclaw/crabbox/pull/113 May 2026: 8,826 commits in 94 repositories

how many of those tokens were spent to buy fake stars using fake email signups?

tl;dr Peter Steinberger shared a product demo for CodexBar [0] with a graph of OpenAI token usage. This graph shows one million spent, prefers gpt-5.5 and spent twenty thousand today.

[0] https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar

However, I do not see a strong reason to believe that this is his actual, personal usage. It could be all openclaw usage or some subset of openai usage, given that he is inside them. I suspect it is far more likely to be fake data [1] that exercises the graph library in a visually satisfying way. Notice that it has no usage for a 'week' after April 15 (a Wednesday), but picks up a bunch later. As marketing copy it needn't have any basis in reality [2]. I should hope openai would put a procedure in front of their entrepreneur acquisition that prevents accidentally exposing trade secrets [3].

[1] https://github.com/faker-js/faker

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/lf2n4...

[3] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostingWhatYouSh...

What product or feature did he build with it and how much ARR did it generate for OpenAI?

you have to admit: he is not as difficult to project paratechnical admiration onto as sama is. maybe the board wants him to be the next ceo

thank god im broke lol

i built my personal app mostly with ollama and it’s been smooth sailing so far. basically openclaw + hermes-style agents running on android phones, and the stuff it can do is kinda insane

I fear our industry has become a circus, even more than it previously was.

the real story is upstream — NVDA has >70% gross margins on the chips powering these tokens. cost drops, margins dont.

He should be brought to the hague XD

AI bros love hyping about their insanely inefficient token usage. It's become some sort of a dick-measuring contest. And if you work for OpenAI, of course you can claim insane measurements.

Just last week I saw a dude boasting about how they used their $20/month ChatGPT subscription to earn $15 (or similar trivial amount) in a bug bounty by running the model the whole day. Sam Altman replied to that tweet but not entirely positively.

OpenAI has been removing limits on token usage to take on Anthropic but I'm sure most of the users they are acquiring are these AI bros who are burning tokens for the sake of it. Massive price hikes are coming after OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs probably an order of magnitude larger than what happened to ride sharing.

100x engineers.

worth mentioning that openai hired him some time ago

So he's spent $20k in one day. There's not a chance in hell he's actually doing productive work with all these tokens.

Grifters gonna grift. What a state of affairs.

Good for him…?! Who gives a shit. OpenClaw is garbage.

So that is $15.6 million in a year. You could get a decent application for that instead of broken slop if you spend it on human salaries.

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What a clown. And Twitter bozos will cheer and clap. As far as money spent, this is still much better than rounding up and/or bombing brown people, but shows insanity of the current market. The saddest part is that bootlickers/temporarily embarrassed AI millionaires will defend this.

And of course I'm just yet another envious hater from "the orange website". Your conscience is clear, AI bros. /s

The OpenClown.