The project
CarboneWatch recognises 74 AI services, and 13 more that only the browser extension sees: their address is someone else's, and the application only counts them when the extension hands it their measurement. Each service carries the type of use it serves and the region where it runs its inference — that region sets the carbon intensity applied, not the one you are in. The full list is provided to organisations preparing a deployment.
Detection works by address, never by hostname — nothing is decrypted. A shared address is therefore not an imprecision: it is foreign traffic billed as inference. A domain served by shared infrastructure — Cloudflare, CloudFront, Azure Front Door — is admitted only if its type carries an hourly cap per service — a tight one, different for text and media. A type with no cap admits none.
The rule used to be absolute — no shared address at all — and it was not held: at the audit of 11 September 2026, eleven services out of the seventy-four there were then broke it, ChatGPT among them. A rule you do not enforce protects nothing. The domains shipped were resolved and checked against a panel of Google, AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel and Akamai witnesses unrelated to AI; the collisions found led to six identifiers being retired and the rule rewritten, rather than kept on paper.
What is deliberately absent, and why →
The registry ships with the application and cannot be modified on the machine. Up to version 0.2.16, an editable copy was read in its place: a domain added to a service was enough to have unrelated traffic counted in the shared footprint.
A missing service or a private deployment — Azure OpenAI, for instance, whose endpoint is specific to each customer — is reported to the publisher, who adds it for everyone in a later version.
| Use | Services | For example |
|---|---|---|
| Chat | 27 | ChatGPT / OpenAI, Claude, Mistral / Le Chat, DeepSeek… |
| Coding | 16 | Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codex… |
| Search | 3 | Perplexity… |
| Image, audio, video | 16 | Midjourney, Runway… |
| Local models | 12 | Ollama, LM Studio… |
