[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.