Peter Steinberger spent a decade building PSPDFKit into a PDF framework running on over a billion devices. He joined OpenAI in February 2026, saying "I want to change the world, not build a large company." A few months later, his open-source project OpenClaw, the fastest-growing project in GitHub history with over 300,000 stars and 3.2 million users, racked up an OpenAI bill of $1,305,088.81 in a single month.
603 billion tokens. 7.6 million API requests. 100 Codex agents running simultaneously. The OpenClaw cost breakdown is the first real look at what autonomous AI agents cost in production.
That's $13,000 per agent per month.
And OpenAI is covering the bill as a "research investment." Regular companies don't get that deal.
The OpenClaw Cost Breakdown
