Closing this for now, to answer the OP’s question: No, we do not make the API slow intentionally. I spend north of 10 hours a day, 6+ days a week advocating for and building things for developers inside of OpenAI. We would never intentionally slow things down. The API is not running with the exact same setup as ChatGPT is which is why you see a different response time. You are also likely using a shared engine which makes things much slower and less predictable.