The Attic Standard Clause

The Attic Standard Clause ties the price of an AI inference purchase agreement to the independent price benchmark for AI inference, so the contract rate follows the market rather than a single vendor's price list. Buyer and seller agree the committed volume and a starting rate; in each settlement period, the rate moves in the same proportion as the reference index.

Rate₀ is the contract rate at signing and Index₀ the base level of the reference index at signing. Index_t is the level published for the settlement period. A floor and a cap, agreed at signing, keep the rate within a range acceptable to both parties. The complete model clause is set out at the end of this page.

A second form follows established commodity practice, in which contracts price at the market plus an agreed differential. The rate starts from the published spot price at signing, moves with the index, and carries a fixed premium or discount, D, that index movements do not affect.

Inference prices move in discrete steps rather than gradually. When a price changes, the median change is a third of the price, and a fixed-rate agreement carries every such step, in either direction, for its full term.

Experienced buyers will recognize that most prices hold from one week to the next: in the latest Attic Standard reading, 1.8% of the 1,290 prices tracked had changed. The significance lies in the size of the changes that do occur. The median change was 33%, and half of all changes fell between 16% and 52%. Three in four were reductions and one in four was an increase.

Newly launched models follow the same pattern. Almost one in five was repriced after launch, and where the price fell, the median reduction was 45%.

No buyer can anticipate which vendor will reprice, or when. An agreement signed the week before a reduction holds the buyer to the former price for its full term; one signed before an increase leaves the seller absorbing the difference until renewal.

The same model, on the same day, sells for up to 3.75 times as much depending on where it is purchased. The open-weight model gpt-oss-120b is priced by thirteen vendors tracked by Attic Standard, at between $0.00020 and $0.00075 per 1,000 output tokens.

The dispersion is significant across the market as a whole. Among all models sold by more than one company:

A vendor's list price establishes what that vendor charges, not what the market charges. The Attic Standard index addresses that gap: a single published figure, calculated by the same method every week, that neither party to an agreement controls.

A $10M annual commitment under the Attic Standard Clause would have cost $48,236 less over its first five months than the same commitment at a fixed rate, and is currently running approximately $317,000 a year below it.

The example assumes a 12-month, $10M commitment to flagship models, signed at the May 2026 base. The rate settles each month on that month's average level of the Attic Standard Flagship output index (AIPI FLG GLB), a published index of the top-line model in each developer's lineup, with a floor at 90% and a cap at 110% of the starting rate. Neither limit was reached.

The index declined 3.5% from its first May reading, with three individual weeks accounting for most of the movement. Monthly invoices under each arrangement compare as follows:Under a fixed rate the invoice is $833,333 every month, $4,166,665 over the five months. Under the Attic Standard Clause, each monthly invoice follows the index:

No renegotiation was required at any point. Had the index moved in the opposite direction, as the published Core index (AIPI COR GLB), which tracks each developer's everyday production model, did over the same months, rising 1.2%, the seller's invoice would have risen with it, within the cap and again without renegotiation. The figures scale proportionally to any commitment size.

The buyer obtains market pricing for the full term without renegotiation, and a cap that limits the cost of any price increase.

The seller exchanges a fixed rate for a longer and larger commitment, a floor under the price and participation in any increase.

A settlement price is credible only if neither party sets it. Attic Standard sells no inference, buys none and routes none; its sole product is the measurement.

The reference should reflect what the buyer actually consumes, which for most enterprises means a blend of published indexes weighted by their own spend.

The clause references the benchmark rather than the spot price, because the benchmark follows the same models over time, so each settlement reflects a change in the price of what was contracted. The spot price serves a different purpose: it establishes where the market stands at signing and informs the starting rate.

Where consumption spans several segments, the reference is a blend of published indexes, or a tailored basket built around the buyer's own models and channels. A substitution right then allows committed volume to move to successor models as they are released, so the agreement captures the savings of newer models without reopening its price terms.

The language below is a starting point for the parties' own counsel to adapt, not legal advice.