OpenClaw Runs 100 AI Agents on $1.3 Million Monthly OpenAI Bill

11 articles · Updated · THE DECODER · May 17

$1.3 million bought OpenClaw about 100 cloud-based Codex agents over 30 days, with the system coding, reviewing pull requests, finding bugs and opening fixes.
603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests drove the bill, with GPT-5.5 the main model and OpenAI covering the cost because Steinberger works there.
Those agents also monitor benchmarks, flag regressions in Discord, deduplicate issues and even turn meeting discussions into draft feature PRs.
Steinberger said the setup tests how software gets built when token costs are not the main constraint; disabling Fast Mode alone would cut spending by 70%.

Is OpenClaw's $1.3M bill a glimpse into coding's future or a warning of an unsustainable AI cost bubble?

With hackers now using AI agents, how can we secure open-source tools like OpenClaw from becoming weapons?

If AI agents can now attend meetings and write code, what is the ultimate role left for human software developers?