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CAD: Cost Anomaly Detection or Create Astounding Debt?
The world of AI is exciting, but there are plenty of expensive pitfalls ready to catch out the unwary, as one Register reader found when taking Anthropic’s Claude Opus for a spin courtesy of Amazon Bedrock.
Our reader managed to run up Bedrock charges totaling $30,141.33 in April 2026, despite using AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (CAD) to avoid any nasty surprises. Thirty-three days before our reader’s first use of Bedrock, the threshold in CAD was set to “Absolute ≥ $100 AND Relative ≥ 40%” so alerts should have fired if things got too spendy.
As for which services to monitor, our reader chose “AWS Services,” which Amazon says “tracks all AWS services automatically.” Except it apparently doesn’t, at least not in the way our reader expected. The problem is that AWS Marketplace isn’t supported by CAD, so costs incurred wouldn’t trigger an alert.
And how are…
