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Some customers may be paying more for Anthropic and OpenAI products than they should be due to billing inaccuracies, according to data from Vaudit, which sells an AI bill-auditing tool. Between March and June, Vaudit audited bills sent to 60 companies totaling $34 million, mostly for usage of Anthropic’s Claude Code, and found about $1.7 million in mistaken overcharges, CEO Michael Hahn told me. Vaudit customers include Panasonic, HP, and Honda, he said. “What we are observing is that enterprise AI billing has become increasingly opaque,” he said. Errant billing isn’t unique to AI, of course, and can be seen throughout enterprise software, cloud services and online advertising. Common AI overcharges included customers using older, less expensive models but getting billed as if they were using newer, more expensive ones, Hahn said. In other cases, Hahn said customers were charged for instances when AI agents or chatbots didn’t complete requests or returned error messages. Other times customers didn’t realize that AI agents that had failed at a task were continuing to try to complete it, known as a retry storm, which added to the charges, Hahn said. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company does not charge customers for incomplete requests of when they receive error messages, does not route customer requests to older models, and that overbilling doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue. An OpenAI spokesperson said it has no evidence any of those issues are happening among its customers. Some of the customers Vaudit audited paid for access to Anthropic and OpenAI models through large cloud providers, Hahn said. Following appeals by Vaudit and its customers, about 80% of the overcharges were credited back to customers by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, Hahn said. The companies have been “incredibly cooperative” when these mishaps happen, he said. AI firms have been criticized for other aspects of their billing. Last week, an Anthropic customer filed a proposed class action lawsuit against the company, alleging it misled customers about the value of its higher-priced subscription tiers. While many customers have been happy to pay up for Anthropic’s market-leading models, some are cutting costs by using cheaper or open-source models. Vaudit, a 30-person startup founded in 2023, sells software that customers install in their AI “environment,” usually through a software developer kit, which captures raw data about customers’ AI usage to compare with invoices and billing records. Hahn, a former Oracle director, started Vaudit as an auditor of bills related to logistics, shipping, advertising and cloud services. It launched its AI bill auditing tool earlier this year. The startup says it charges a fee of 1% of the value of the bills it reviews and an additional 30% on refunds issued following its audits.
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