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

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.

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

> 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...

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.

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.

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)

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

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

> 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.

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?

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.

Free month is insane for a bit of downtime

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.

What you expect is irrelevant.

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

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?

> 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.

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.

The subs for those alternative providers have similar tiering but more generous token allocations than Anthropic and OpenAI, and deliver good enough quality to be worth it.

If I needed to fall back on OpenRouter, it'd be paid per token, of course, but that'd take 4 major providers being down, in which case I suspect I'll have more critical things to worry about.

As it is, I use more than I could with a single $200 Claude Max subscription anyway, so I distribute my tasks across multiple providers.

Even without that it's cheap insurance given the cost of lost time.

No more than when they are up, no. Why would I? I can produce far more by having tasks running in the background while I do other work.

If my laptop breaks I'm not going back to pen and paper, I'm buying a new/different laptop.

Wouldn't know how