As Anthropic raises the prices of its AI tools, more companies say they are feeling the burden. Some also point to the difficulty of predicting costs.

The Information reported on May 14 that Anthropic customers such as PagerDuty and ServiceNow are unable to forecast their AI tool costs this year. ServiceNow has already used up its annual budget for Anthropic AI tools.

ServiceNow Chief Digital Information Officer Kelly Romack (켈리 로맥) cited a lack of usage data as a reason it is hard to predict Anthropic costs. She said Anthropic does not automatically provide granular data showing which employees use which tools, how much and in what way.

Romack said software companies such as ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft and Workday provide such "telemetry" data to customers.

She said such data would make it easier to identify employees who use tools inefficiently or excessively and block them more easily.

There is a workaround. If customers connect Claude accounts to external analytics tools via a standard API, they can monitor employee usage to some extent. But doing so requires a separate tool to analyse the data.

Romack said ServiceNow tracks employees' daily usage of Claude tools using its AI Control Tower application. ServiceNow assigned 1 person to be dedicated to data monitoring for this.

Another Anthropic customer, insurer National Life Group, is also facing a lack of granular usage data for employee Claude accounts. Nimesh Mehta (니메시 메타), National Life Group's chief information strategy officer, said the issue shows Anthropic is "great for consumers but not suitable for companies looking to monitor usage by individual."

Romack and Mehta also said Anthropic does not provide service-level agreements specifying product performance standards and customer service response times. Romack said she is not dissatisfied with Anthropic and understands that its technology and business are still in the early stages, but added, "I want more transparency."