Peter Steinberger 1 month token spend

$1.3 million in API tokens. One developer. 30 days.

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, dropped a screenshot of his last 30 days token spend. 603B tokens, $20K in one day alone.

He's pushing hard on what these long-running, parallel agentic loops are doing at production scale.

You have to wonder at the token economics though. If he's shipping what would take a team of human engineers many months to build, then perhaps $1.3M might be cheap. Or are his agents spinning in circles, generating expensive, backtracking and retry noise?

Token cost is now a first class engineering concern, needing agent unit measurements to see what we're getting for every $10K spent. And where agent cost is important as agent capability.

$1.3 million in 30 days. And imagine, those token costs are subsidised. Today's frontier models are incredible, but are their harnesses efficient enough to let them run and can we afford them?