About Attic Standard
Buyers of AI inference cannot answer the question that buyers in every other infrastructure market take for granted: is this price normal. Vendors publish in units of their own choosing, per million tokens here, per image or per second of video there, some with a cached tier and some without. Rates move week to week, and the moves are announced by whoever benefits from them. There is no neutral series to check any of it against.
What follows is what always follows. Buyers overpay because they have nothing to compare against. Finance teams cannot forecast a line item that changes without warning. And the vendors who move first end up setting the reference price for everyone else, which is a position no competitor can argue with and no customer can audit.
The gap matters most where money is committed. Enterprises now sign multi-year inference agreements priced against a vendor’s own rate card, with no independent reference to anchor the price at signing or to adjust it as the market moves.
Attic Standard operates as a price reporting agency for AI inference, in the tradition of the agencies that publish reference prices for energy and commodities. Each week we capture the published rates of every vendor we track, verify them at source, normalize them into comparable units and calculate a family of chained indexes that measure repricing on identical models.
Every published value traces to a vendor’s published rate, the source it was read from and the date it was captured. The construction is documented in full in our methodology, and the indexes are administered in alignment with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks.
Buyers and sellers use the indexes to assess a price against the market, and the same series can be written into a commitment through the Attic Standard Clause.
The value of a price reporting agency is greatest when its indexes are written into contracts. The Attic Standard Clause allows an inference commitment to be priced against an Attic Standard index, as a ratio to the index or as the index plus or minus a fixed differential, rather than against a vendor’s fixed rate card. The committed price follows the market over the term, and both parties settle on a number neither of them sets.
From the fifth century BC, Athens struck its silver coinage to the Attic standard, a fixed weight of silver mined at Laurion in Attica. The Athenian tetradrachm, known for the owl on its reverse, was accepted by merchants across the Mediterranean because its weight and purity could be relied upon, and the standard outlived the city’s political power when Alexander the Great adopted it for the coinage of his empire.
Attic Standard takes its name from that tradition, and from the region where the company is based.
Attic Standard holds no commercial position in the market it measures. It does not resell capacity, route requests or earn a margin on any price it reports. No vendor sponsors an index, pays for inclusion or can pay for exclusion, and no vendor sees a figure before publication.
Commercial and assessment functions are kept separate, conflicts of interest are declared and recorded, and changes to the methodology are announced before they take effect. These arrangements are set out in the methodology, together with our alignment with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks.
Independence is a deliberate constraint on the business. It rules out the revenue model on which most price comparison services rely, charging the companies being compared, because a benchmark whose figures can be influenced commercially cannot serve as a reference for either side of a transaction.
The methodology sets out the full construction of the benchmark, from admission and normalization to the chained matched-model calculation, governance and our alignment with the IOSCO Principles. The homepage publishes the indexes each week with current coverage and movement, and the clause page sets out how a commitment can be priced against an index.