OpenClaw Founder Discloses $10M AI Token Bill for September

At Cloudflare Connect 2026 in San Francisco on October 23, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger disclosed that his AI-related work consumed $10 million worth of tokens in September, with the cost covered by investors. He added that not all token usage produced practical value, responding to the audience's surprise.

During the conversation with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht, the two discussed AI agent infrastructure and the cost of moving workloads to the cloud. Steinberger argued that current infrastructure has not kept pace with AI developments, questioning why some workloads still need to run on local machines. He also acknowledged that cloud-based AI agents raise privacy and compliance concerns and can incur significant operating costs.

The discussion also touched on the impact of AI-generated code on open source communities. Knecht noted that some maintainers, overwhelmed by low-quality AI-generated submissions, have stopped accepting external pull requests. Steinberger said the way code is submitted should change, with contributors explaining their reasoning from problem to solution, which he said would increase his trust in the output.

Looking ahead, Steinberger predicted that future users might have an always-on assistant that thinks continuously and anticipates needs. On trust and permission management, he emphasized that users' trust in underlying models matters because model behavior is not fully constrained by external harness code. He said users should not grant agents full permissions even if engineering measures mitigate risks like prompt injection, and proposed using a dedicated agent to approve another agent's permissions through multi-agent negotiation.