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Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Thursday, September 3, 2026

Concerns Raised Over Anthropic's AI Model Pricing and Availability

Andrew Sharp expressed curiosity about Anthropic's strategy to address customer complaints regarding high token costs and frequent server downtime, especially given the improving performance of competitor models. Ben Thompson noted that Anthropic seems to lack sufficient compute resources, leading to these issues.

personAndrew SharppersonBen ThompsoncompanyAnthropic

The tape

4 quotes
Well, I am very curious because I'm aware that they charge massive margins, lots of people have complained about the token costs over the last several months.
Andrew Sharp
People are getting more price sensitive and the competing models are getting more performant than they've ever been before.
Andrew Sharp
From what I can see, they don't have enough compute. They clearly still have not enough compute.
Ben Thompson
Their servers are down all the time. They were down a bunch like last week.
Ben Thompson
Heard on Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson — “(Preview) Fable 5.1 and Anthropic’s Data Retention Pivot, AI Civilizations and Related Matters, Q&A on Meta, Shopify, 3-D Printing, published Thursday, September 3, 2026. Heardvine summarizes and quotes with attribution and timestamps, and links to the original everywhere.
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Concerns Raised Over Anthropic's AI Model Pricing and Availability — Heardvine