Anthropic Batch API: 112 of My 1,842 Jobs Never Came Back
A user emailed me a screenshot of an empty report. Score field blank. I opened the database and found the row sitting there with score = NULL , created four hours earlier, no error logged anywhere. My worker had run, my batch had finished, my code had written nothing and moved on cheerfully. That was the third one that week. So I pulled 30 days of logs and counted: I had pushed 1,842 scoring jobs…
In a recent incident, the user discovered that 112 out of 1,842 jobs completed through the Anthropic Batch API did not return usable results. This issue arose from the assumption that batch processing status "ended" indicated a successful request. In reality, "ended" merely means Anthropic had finished processing the batch, without guaranteeing the correctness of each individual job.
The main takeaway from this story is the importance of accurately checking for each request's result type and handling errors appropriately, rather than relying solely on the batch's overall status.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
