Why Anthropic Costs Are Unpredictable

Anthropic customers are already feeling pinched by the company’s AI price hikes, Aaron and I reported Wednesday. Making matters harder, Anthropic customers like PagerDuty and ServiceNow, which says it already blew through its full-year budget for Anthropic AI tools, can’t predict what they’ll pay this year.

One reason Anthropic costs are tough to predict, ServiceNow chief digital information officer Kellie Romack told me, is that Anthropic doesn’t automatically show customers the kind of granular data that allows them to see which of its users consume which tools; how much they use the tools, and how they’re using them. Software firms such as ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft and Workday offer such “telemetry” data to their customers, she said.

Having that data from Anthropic would make it easier to cut off employees who are “tokenmaxxing” or using the tools inefficiently.