AWS CEO Defends Investing in Both Anthropic and OpenAI

AWS CEO Matt Garman defended the cloud provider's decision to invest billions in both Anthropic and OpenAI, calling the arrangement compatible with Amazon's existing business practices. The comments address apparent tensions in Amazon's AI strategy. AWS has committed up to $8 billion to Anthropic while simultaneously pouring billions into OpenAI through its Amazon SageMaker partnership and infrastructure credits. The two AI labs are direct competitors in the foundation model market. Garman pointed to AWS's history of competing with its own partners as precedent. Amazon Web Services has long offered services that compete with software vendors that also run on AWS infrastructure. The executive characterized the dual investments as providing customers maximum choice in AI models. The investment strategy reflects the cloud wars intensifying around AI workloads. Microsoft has exclusive ties to OpenAI through its multibillion-dollar partnership, while Google Cloud leans on its internal DeepMind and Gemini teams. AWS is attempting to maintain neutrality while securing access to leading models. The approach also hedges Amazon's bets. If one AI lab pulls ahead, AWS maintains a commercial relationship. If both succeed, the cloud provider captures compute revenue from training and inference regardless of which model developers choose. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has publicly commented on sharing an investor.