💰 OpenAI and Anthropic Mistakenly Billed $1.7M in AI Tokens

Startup Vaudit found erroneous AI-service charges at 60 companies totaling roughly $1.7M—about 5% of all audited spending. Most of the examined invoices were tied to Claude Code. Vaudit's clients include Panasonic, HP, and Honda.

🔍 Where Do the Extra Charges Come From?

Auditors point to three typical scenarios. Sometimes an older, cheaper model answers instead of the new, expensive one. In other cases, money is charged for unfinished requests or ones that ended in an error. And occasionally an agent fails a task but keeps retrying it over and over, burning tokens and inflating the bill.

💡 Anthropic says it doesn't charge for incomplete requests or errors and doesn't see overbilling as a widespread problem. OpenAI said it has found no evidence of such failures among its clients.

Although the issues may stem from an intermediary cloud provider, Vaudit says clients have already been refunded about 80% of the disputed charges.

Have you ever run into incorrect AI bills?

🔥 — Yes, it's annoying
🤔 — No, never

@hiaimediaen