May 18, 2026

OpenClaw creator’s $1.3 million monthly OpenAI bill reveals the real cost of autonomous AI coding at scale

green and white labeled bottle beside sliced watermelon
Mahbod Akhzami / Unsplash

Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw and an engineer at OpenAI, racked up $1.3 million in API costs in a single month by running approximately 100 Codex instances simultaneously on his open-source project. The bill, which covered 603 billion to...