[calvinmorrison]

Azure does bills on credit, IE: you spend and pay later. That's up to them, but it's far riskier than prepurchased credits.

I'd find a jury unwilling to believe that a similar real life scenario would raise no flags. It's only a flag raiser because tech companies have automated away all human interaction with billing. Imagine someone claiming to be bob, who regularly shops at the grocery store for 100 dollars a week, now wants to come in and spend, say, 10,000 dollars, on credit. This would be a red flag to any proprietor. Now imagine that proprietor going after bob, who was not there, and claim he is responsible.

[gigel82]

We don't know enough about what happened but I disagree this should be an automatic red flag from the provider's side. I'm sure Azure has spending limits and alarms that one can set up (and probably should).

The attitude of "provider should eat the cost" is ripe for abuse. I can set up some expensive GPU instances to train my GPT4 clone (millions worth of compute) than -after getting my models- claim I was "hacked" and refuse to pay my bill. Or maybe -more benign- have some buyer remorse after setting up a public instance for people to test out my new AI product then get scared when it gets the HN "hug of death" and my bill skyrockets.