Amazon may use OpenAI and Nova models after Anthropic reportedly raises costs

The move is aimed at cutting costs rather than ending Amazon's relationship with Anthropic as per reports

Amazon is reportedly considering to use OpenAI models and even its own Nova family of AI models after Anthropic raised the cost of using Claude inside Amazon services.

According to a report from The Information, Amazon is weighing its options to reduce costs under a new arrangement with Anthropic. But back in April, Amazon said it would invest $5 billion more in Anthropic, with the possibility of adding up to another $20 billion if certain commercial milestones are met.

That investment actually came on top of another $8 billion Amazon had already put into the Claude maker. Anthropic, meanwhile, committed to spend more than $100 billion over 10 years on AWS technologies, including Amazon’s Trainium chips.

Amazon isn't just a customer of Anthropic but also one of the most important backers and cloud partners. This is why it makes it interesting that Amazon is considering other alternatives to handle its internal workloads.

Although Amazon has been building its own options for a while now. Its Nova family of AI models was announced in late 2024 for Amazon Bedrock, with models aimed at text, image, and video tasks. Amazon pitched the model around cost and latency at that time.

With that said, OpenAI has also become a more realistic option recently for AWS customers as well as for Amazon itself. Earlier this year, OpenAI brought its latest models and Codex coding agent to Amazon Bedrock, after changes to its previously more restrictive Microsoft cloud arrangement.

This allowed AWS to serve even those customers who wanted other alternatives from Claude, without having to move workloads out of Amazon's cloud.

Evaluating alternatives could also be due to commercial pressure and not necessarily a sign of a damaged partnership between Amazon and Anthropic. Whether or not Amazon is actually considering switching entirely to OpenAI's models or its own Nova models remains unknown at this moment.