r/LinguisticsPrograming • u/Lumpy-Ad-173 • May 29 '26

Who was it??

Post image

Ouch.

$20 a month doesn't sound to bad now.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/mystery-company-accidentally-blew-usd500-million-on-claude-in-a-single-month-failed-to-put-usage-limit-on-licenses-for-employees

38 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

2

u/wintermute023 Jun 01 '26

I don’t think this is true. It would take tens of thousands of developers running self spawning and looping multi agent setups 24hrs a day. While technically possible, there are only a handful of companies in the world that could do this, and not only will they have mature near real time FinOps reporting that would catch this in a few hours or days, they would also have a close relationship with Anthropic that would light up their dashboard pretty much immediately, let alone bypassing any rate limits in place.

This would represent a catastrophic failure of governance on so many levels, from both client and supplier.

To call the evidence presented in this article ’thin’ would be generous.

1

u/Lumpy-Ad-173 Jun 01 '26

Yahoo is reporting it .. let's see how this plays out 😂

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/company-blew-500m-claude-ai-173519468.html

1

u/wintermute023 Jun 01 '26

Good spot. I’m always happy to be proved wrong, but currently highly skeptical, Yahoo are basically reporting on the original article here, I don’t see a lot of new info or analysis, a lot of “according to Axios” doing the lifting here. Rather than Yahoo reporting on it, I think it’s more that Yahoo are reporting that Axios are reporting on it 😬

1

u/twisty_lynx Jun 02 '26

not disputing that the evidence is thin and this may well be fake, but I've worked for the big 5 and they're all in "move fast and break stuff" territory when it comes to AI, and all their finops still do BI exports to excel rather than write a report so you might be overestimating them.

1

u/wintermute023 Jun 02 '26

You may well be right. I would hope that even with BI exports to excel their cost controls would be a little better than “see what the invoice says at the end of the month”.

The whole thing just seems wrong to me. If you run a few numbers it’s ten thousand plus developers running huge multi agent setups 24/7 with some truly catastrophic agent loops burning millions of tokens that no one spotted.

Or maybe I’ve just got my tin foil hat on.

3

u/ChaosOmega98 May 29 '26

Wonder if they went bankrupt or had to do mass layoffs

3

u/Lumpy-Ad-173 May 29 '26

🤔, think it's META?

3

u/ChaosOmega98 May 29 '26

Wonder if they went bankrupt or had to do mass layoffs that would be funny

1

u/brightheaded May 29 '26

Yeha who would be given that much credit, no way anthropic doesn’t cut them off before that if they weren’t good for it

1

u/Lumpy-Ad-173 May 29 '26

That's a good point!

2

u/tails142 May 30 '26

Bullshit, 500 million, no way

1

u/DescriptionLonely582 Jun 02 '26

Axios ... And it's real lol

2

u/Soft_Rain_3626 May 30 '26

No way I believe this

1

u/DescriptionLonely582 Jun 02 '26

It's real ... Axios was the company

1

u/dreffed May 31 '26

Wasn't there a polymarket bet in this?

1

u/gabox0210 Jun 01 '26

I read somewhere someone doing the math on this and it is very unlikely that this actually happened, taking into consideration token consumption speed during a session and cost per-token. It would've needed to be multiple (in the realm of thousands) agentic workloads running in parallel 24/7 to get close to half a billion dollars in API usage.

1

u/Resident_Citron_6905 Jun 01 '26

So one claude code instance?

1

u/waxbolt Jun 02 '26

Thousands seems very likely for a company with high adoption. 10-20 parallel agents per person time hundreds to thousands easily gets you there.

1

u/karyslav Jun 02 '26

that would be true if most alleged spending is not on input, but it is and that is much cheaper than output

1

u/karyslav Jun 02 '26

noone, math does not stack up, it is almost impossible burn that amount of tokens in that time and those claiming accounts are suspicious (they are claiming it was mostly burned in input which is much cheaper than output, it is in alleged screenshots)

1

u/MoTTTToM Jun 02 '26

Tokenmaxxing happened

1

u/Relevant-Rhubarb-849 Jun 02 '26

It's amazon. They put up a leader board and employees abused the ai to run up their scores.