# OpenClaw creator says he spent $10 million in tokens last month — retained record > Retained news record from news:theregister. Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/38550969575e9933 [← sources](https://highsignal.app/data) source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:theregister) published 2026-10-21 20:40 ingested 2026-10-22 02:59 [original source ↗](https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/21/openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-tokens-last-month/5304573) ## extract AI - Nvidia woos wary Europeans with more open weights models New embedding, parsing, and reranking models promise smarter agentic RAG workflows - Jensen Huang sends in the robot ducks to sell Nvidia's AI-everywhere vision Containerized datacenters, androids, and telecoms all feature in Berlin keynote interrupted by environmental protesters - Nvidia's grand plan for speeding up datacenter deployments: AI trailer parks GPUzilla boasts modular bit barns could speed up deployments from six months to just two weeks - The spec is the new code, so brush up on your prose, says Kaseya CTO Domain expertise and clear writing will matter more than syntax, and yes, that means documentation - Happiness is the next AI KPI if Oxford boffins have their way Researchers say public subsidies for AI should be repaid in wellbeing, not just economic growth Infosec - Security Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more! - Security Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more - Black Hat and DEF CON DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure Voting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included - Security EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz Acronis Went at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified - Malware Month Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight On the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career FOSS - Red Hat helps teach about tech writing But learns tough lessons about AI in the process - NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS Increasing awareness and adoption, followed by increasing donations - OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficulties Persistent agents appeal to AI companies, but demand isn't obvious - Ubuntu 'Stonking Stingray' beta swims out: Deeper Rust 'oxidization' plus LLM speech-to-text GNOME 51 is here, and Ubuntu interim releases are getting interesting again - Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of care All this, and angry NeoVim users - Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?* Yet another new version of Firefox, with a significant reskin ## retained text ``` Peter Steinberger, member of technical staff at OpenAI and the creator of OpenClaw, estimates that he spent around $10 million in tokens running AI workloads last month. But don't feel bad for him, because it's all coming out of investors' pockets. He made this admission at the Cloudflare Connect 2026 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, in a conversation with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht. Knecht previously observed that Steinberger has acknowledged having "a virtually unlimited token budget, which not all of us in the room have." Responding to the audible surprise rising from the audience, Steinberger added, "What people don't always understand is not all of that is useful." That only amplified the murmuring, perhaps not the effect he had been after. Meanwhile, his employer, OpenAI, is reportedly trying to "accelerate funding" ahead of rival Anthropic's expected IPO. Steinberger's subsequent musing about his preferred way of working failed to recognize Knecht's acknowledgement of financial limitations. "I feel like the main challenge a lot of people still have is that our infrastructure structure hasn't really caught up yet," Steinberger said. "Like why is this still using my computer? Shouldn't this all be in the cloud?" Apart from the privacy and compliance implications of relying on cloud-based AI, cost remains a consideration for anyone not setting venture funds alight. Cloud-hosted agents can be expensive. Shouldn't this all run locally? Pointing to the OpenClaw project and how a lot of open source maintainers have given up accepting pull requests due to frustration with AI slop, Knecht asked Steinberger whether we're approaching the death of open source or a golden age of AI. Steinberger said he thinks the way pull requests are handled needs to change because people don't explain how they arrived at their proposed changed code. "If I see your thoughts, how you got from A to B, my trust in the output is way higher than if you just throw the finished work across the fence," he said. Knecht also asked Steinberger whether everyone in the room would have hundreds of AI agents running in a few years. Steinberger doubts it will be hundreds. "I think everyone will have some sort of intelligence that runs and thinks and helps them throughout the day or even predicts what could help you in the future," he said. "So instead of asking the question, maybe you already get the answer." Toward the end of the session, Knecht raised the issue of trust and how to know what data to give to an agent. That's a hard question, Steinberger admitted. Part of it, he said, has to do with how much you trust the underlying model itself, because so much of model behavior is not governed by the harness – the code that wraps the model. "A lot of decisions that I built into OpenClaw early on now can change because the models are so much better," he said. Even if risks like prompt injection have been reduced through engineering efforts, Steinberger said, "you might not want to give your agent all the permissions." Instead, he suggested using an agent to authorize your agent. "You want to have another agent that can give it permissions or not and then this agent has to negotiate with another agent," he said. "Many times the agents are like, 'oh yeah, actually maybe I shouldn't do this,' or 'there's a simpler way that keeps it within the guardrails.' So those those two systems combined greatly increase my trust that I just can let the agent rip." ® ``` document fetched 2026-10-24 11:21 · canonical https://theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/21/openclaw-creator-says-he-spent-10-million-in-tokens-last-month/5304573