Peter Steinberger's 100 AI agents racked up $1.3 million in OpenAI tokens in 30 days building OpenClaw

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.