Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer who created OpenClaw and joined OpenAI as CTO in February, posted a screenshot of his API usage dashboard on Friday showing $1,305,088.81 in OpenAI spending over 30 days. The bill covered 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests, all generated by roughly 100 Codex instances operated by a three-person team.
The Numbers
OpenAI covers the tab. According to Tom’s Hardware, the top model on the dashboard was GPT-5.5, dated April 23, 2026. On the day Steinberger posted the screenshot, his account logged $19,985.84 in spend and 206,000 requests.
Steinberger clarified in a follow-up post that the $1.3 million figure reflects Codex’s “Fast Mode” pricing, which burns credits at a significantly higher rate than standard execution. Disabling Fast Mode alone would cut the raw API cost to around $300,000, according to Tom’s Hardware. That $300,000 figure is still revealing: a single $200-per-month Codex Pro subscription provides roughly $5,000 to $6,000 in API-equivalent value per billing cycle. By that math, Steinberger’s non-fast-mode usage would equate to approximately 60 Codex Pro subscriptions.
What the Agents Actually Do
The 100 Codex instances are not idle compute. According to The Decoder, Steinberger’s fleet autonomously reviews pull requests, scans commits for security vulnerabilities, deduplicates GitHub issues, and writes fixes. Some agents open PRs based on the project’s broader roadmap. Others monitor performance benchmarks and flag regressions to the team’s Discord server. Certain agents even attend meetings and generate PRs for features that come up in conversation.
The team also uses Clawpatch.ai, Vercel’s Deepsec, and Codex Security for additional bug and security analysis, according to The Decoder.
The Subsidy Math
OpenAI estimates that Codex costs between $100 and $200 per developer per month on average, though it warns of high variance depending on model choice and automation intensity, according to Tom’s Hardware. Steinberger’s usage sits at the extreme end of that variance, but it puts a hard number on the gap between what developers pay and the underlying compute costs.
AI coding tools are competing aggressively on pricing right now. Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor all subsidize inference costs well below API rates to attract developers. OpenAI shifted Codex to token-based billing in April, a move that signaled the subsidy model may not last indefinitely. Steinberger’s $1.3 million month shows exactly how wide the gap between subscription revenue and actual inference cost can get when agents run at full tilt.
Steinberger framed the spending as deliberate. He told The Decoder he wants to see how software would be built if token costs didn’t matter, and that everything his team builds is open source. “I’d say pretty high,” he said when asked about ROI.