[bashtoni]

And unlike OpenAI, Anthropic don't seem to reset weekly usage quotas after an outage.

Anthropic seem to be both letting their competitors outplay them and making unforced errors (like the anti Open Weights models stuff and the frequent Fable->Opus downgrades for 'safety').

Outages are inevitable in this early high growth, rapid development era, but tactical errors are not.

[cbg0]

Anthropic would give out resets like OpenAI if they had capacity to do so, it's not like they haven't thought about doing the obvious.

OAI waits until overall cluster demand goes down before giving out a reset, they just happen to have much more spare capacity than Anthropic.

[smoe]

Over the last couple months, I’ve gotten the impression that OAI does indeed have the better infra setup and team, not just more capacity.

I don’t think Codex’s 99.98% uptime vs Claude Code’s 99.44%, is just due to OAI having more hardware to run it on.

https://status.openai.com/

https://status.claude.com/

[CuriouslyC]

OAI 100% has a stronger engineering culture than Anthropic. You can see it in the evolution of Codex vs Claude Code as well.

[odo1242]

Having more servers does help more than you think though. us-east-1 is the AWS region with the most downtime by a large margin simply because it’s the region with the highest demand.

Having too much demand on limited servers means that less of those servers are going to be available for redundancy.

[gunalx]

Isn't us-east-1 also an early rollout region for new stuff as well?

[gorpigo]

When I worked there no, we wouldn’t test in the most popular region first.

[genidoi]

Why would they have more spare capacity than Anthropic? Do you have a source for that?

[chaos_emergent]

If you watch the Dwarkesh interview with Dario, he is extremely conservative with compute allocation as of early 2026, where Sam has been compute-pilled for at least 3 years[1] and believes that we’re going to have several OOMs more FLOPs in the near future than we have today.

You can also get a drift of it in their announcements - OpenAI has been far more aggressive in datacenter build-out partnerships as a more top-down allocation strategy since 2024, and Anthropic has rented out existing compute from infrastructure-heavy companies that are losing the model race in what seems like a more desperate ad-hoc compute acquisition strategy.

In all, Dario’s conservatism was in service of not going bankrupt, but any inspection of his argument that an overallocation of compute a year too early results in bankruptcy falls flat: there’s so much demand for mechanized intelligence in the world today that it’s easy to rent out compute if you have too great a supply.

[1]: recall that he was trying to court the saudis into investing $1T to build his own chips

[lilytweed]

Anthropic being very conservative about purchasing compute was a core theme of Dario's spot at NYT Dealbook in December[1]. At the time, he cast it as being wise and waiting to see where the chips fall. I'd say he might be regretting that position a bit now.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEj7wAjwQIk

[usef-]

In previous years Sam's huge hardware deals were seen as a crazy example of the bubble but currently are looking rather fortunate.

Though Dario's reasoning still applies this year, as the scale keeps increasing. Very interesting to know how it will go.

[bob1029]

> According to the memo, which was reported by Bloomberg and CNBC, OpenAI put its own 2025 capacity at 1.9 gigawatts — a figure it said was three times what it had the year before — and placed Anthropic's equivalent figure at 1.4 gigawatts. OpenAI told investors it foresees its own footprint climbing into the "low-double-digit range" of gigawatts within a year and hitting 30 gigawatts by 2030, and that Anthropic would top out somewhere between seven and eight gigawatts before the close of 2027.

https://qz.com/openai-investor-memo-compute-advantage-anthro...

[tjoff]

Interesting, but also wholly incomplete without knowing how effective the respective models are and how much people are actually using them.

[beering]

True, and the pricing plus token efficiency seem to suggest that gpt-5.6 is much more efficient. But hard to know since neither lab publishes that info and it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison.

[tjoff]

Isn't both of those, potentially, just consequences of OAI having more spare compute?

[dchftcs]

They were famous for committing to buying compute with future money that many people thought they would go bankrupt. Anthropic was afraid of going bankrupt and didn't do the same.

[ACCount37]

And then Anthropic had to go around, knock at every door and ask every neighbor for whether they have any spare compute to sell.

[cbg0]

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/openai-lift...

There's less clear info about this from Anthropic's side, but given their frequent issues and lack of resets and overall less usage given to users on their subscriptions plans, it's a pretty simple conclusion to draw.

[solenoid0937]

extremely well known fact in the industry. they have reams of spare compute for prosumers which is why they can afford to give away so many resets and have even more subsidized usage limits

we are in the "millennial lifestyle subsidy" era for AI where companies ruthlessly undercut each other in an attempt to win marketshare, before then ratcheting up prices

[hangrybear666]

Maybe because they committed to buy up 40% of the world's RAM supply by themselves and completely overestimated demand.

[odo1242]

OpenAI has been way more aggressive about capacity than anyone else (as evidenced by the fact that it was them that caused the RAM price spike)

[catlifeonmars]

Source?

> it's not like they haven't thought about doing the obvious.

[solenoid0937]

It was a one hour outage on a weekend. Unless you have an enterprise agreement with an SLA it's a bit silly to expect any compensation.

[londons_explore]

If I pay anything for a service, I expect a refund if that service doesn't work.

Best would be a free week/month for anyone who sent a request during the downtime.

[solenoid0937]

> Best would be a free week/month for anyone who sent a request during the downtime

This is bizarrely out of touch. It would be a courtesy but it's not a "reasonable expectation" at all.

At best you could maybe reasonably expect a prorated refund for the time of unavailability, but then Fable was still available.

[ShinTakuya]

I think it's not out of bounds to expect a company to go a little further to compensate for an issue. A prorated 1 hour refund doesn't reflect the reality that maybe that hour was more important to the customer because it was their only free time in the week. A free week is way too much but a free day sounds appropriate.

[londons_explore]

If there is a hole in the street and you fall down it, you wouldn't expect a refund just for the 1 second it would have taken you to drive over that hole.

Instead you should be compensated for your losses - the time and money it took you to repair that tyre.

Same with a web service. If I pay for 24 * 7 service and it's not working when I go to use it, I want compensation for my time and effort resolving the matter.

For some that'll be small - eg. Searching Google instead, taking 30 seconds. For others it'll be a big headache.

But downtime of 1 hour is almost certainly more costly for the consumer than 1/30/24 * subscription price.

[solenoid0937]

Yeah, no, that's not how any of this works. This is the definition of inflated self importance!

Your contract doesn't have an SLA. If you are important enough, you can certainly negotiate one - and it will be far more expensive than your prosumer subscription.

And even then you will not get a 1:168 or 1:720 SLA like you are expecting - that's simply ludicrous and totally out of touch with every reality. Even if you were a lucrative enterprise customer (which you are not) they'd tell you to get lost.

> If there is a hole in the street and you fall down it, you wouldn't expect a refund just for the 1 second

Actually, you wouldn't get a refund at all unless you suffer damage or injury, which is an high bar to prove in court and a totally separate ball game.

[gozucito]

I’d be happy with just some credits.

Enough to offset any KV cache miss expenses is the absolute minimum.

The smart play is to refund customers something like $20-50 worth of unsubsidized credits.

Those are high margin and only the equivalent of 45 minutes of Fable usage once the KV cache reload costs are factored in.

Yet customers often need a few credits to finish a job without waiting 5 hours or days for their reset.

Keep in mind openAI already gives me free resets I can use when I want which are very useful to me. Seems a no brainer to tack those to subscriptions, actually.

It gives the user a little more flexibility, a little more control over their tools.

[furyofantares]

If you pay anything for a service you expect a refund on the order of hundreds of hours of credit (168 in a week) for every hour of downtime?

[Azantys]

Free month is insane for a bit of downtime

[einsteinx2]

They’re down so often that if they gave a free month every time they’d have no paying customers lol.

[jm4]

Are you crazy? Do you realize how much use they allow under a subscription already? I’m going through $200-400 in tokens per day on a $200/month subscription. Nobody has ever said anything, throttled me, encouraged me to go to API pricing, etc.

I wish it didn’t go down so frequently, but it does. Still, I get an enormous amount of value. I realize they probably prioritize API users over subscribers and I’m ok with that. I use the API and openrouter for the things that need to be resilient to outages.

I would be embarrassed to try to ask for a refund or free credits. They already give credits far in excess of what you pay for and you have practically the entire month to use them outside of a couple hours of downtime.

[close04]

Not that it wouldn’t be a nice gesture but what did you agree when you bought the service? What’s the SLA? What’s the compensation model, service credits? Do you have anything like “for 1h downtime you get 2h for free”?

When you miss 1h of your job, do you give back a month for free?

[bigDinosaur]

What you expect is irrelevant.

[anonzzzies]

So many companies have shitloads of downtime and do not compensate. Usually they blame you if they can.

[croemer]

2 more outages today (by midday UTC).

Yesterday it was down for 1.5hr, today it's 1hr for incident 1, and the second one is open for 10min now.

[bashtoni]

You've misunderstood completely. No-one expects compensation. In reality, if you had a high enough limit anyway (ie, you bought a big enough plan), a reset makes no difference to you, so what sort of "compensation" is it anyway? This is about a fascinating battle for developer mindshare.

Claude Code built a lot of good will amongst developers. OpenAI are playing a great tactical game to try and catch up by offering things like weekly usage limit resets after outages.

Of course, once the finance types get control after the rapid growth phase is complete the inevitable enshitification will begin with comments exactly like yours.

[throwaway314155]

They could at least give back the equivalent in usage for cache invalidation. Or, you know, just the usage you would have had for the ~1-2 hours of outage. Would buy them a lot of good will and they seem comfortable throwing cash in the trash.

[solenoid0937]

> Would buy them a lot of good will and they seem comfortable throwing cash in the trash.

I think Anthropic is past this point. They are trying to get to profitability. They literally don't have enough compute to serve their demand.

OpenAI on the other hand I can totally see doing this. They need to gain marketshare and gain it fast or they're screwed.

[matt-p]

Yeah I agree, I understand a weekly reset in some cases could be over the top but if they did a 5-hour reset and took 20% off your weekly usage that would offset the additional cost/inconvenience for most users.

[vikramkr]

Unfortunately the one thing they seem to keep not letting their competitors our play them at is coming out with really damn good models. Not consistently mind you - openai had a really solid lead for a few months earlier this year when it looked like they were running away with it, but then we get fable 5 and opus 5 and people will put up with a lot to get that model quality

[hedgehog]

They do reset weekly quotas periodically, I'm not sure how they determine when.

[stevefan1999]

Yeah, they can't guarantee a SLA and cost reimbursement policy, such a shame

[anon_anon12]

Anthropic going through their god-complex arc after getting hit with export controls

[theptip]

And yet demand outstrips supply; so they must be underpricing for the quality level they are hitting.