Anthropic raises AI pricing for Amazon after security tip-off, straining partnership

Amazon, the world's largest cloud company, faces a sharp rise in costs after renegotiating its contract for Anthropic's AI models.

The Information, a US technology publication, reported Sunday (local time), citing multiple sources, that Amazon and Anthropic revised some contract terms earlier this year and agreed to switch the pricing structure for Amazon's use of Anthropic's AI models — starting next year — from a compute-time basis to a token-based system. A token is the smallest unit of computation in AI processing; in English, one word typically equals about 1.3 tokens.

The pricing change is expected to significantly increase Amazon's costs, given that the company has embedded Anthropic's AI across a wide range of consumer and enterprise tools, including the shopping assistant Alexa for Shopping, the coding tool Kiro and the workplace tool Q.

Amazon has been moving to strengthen its ties with OpenAI this year, even as Anthropic had been its primary investment target and key partner.

In February, Amazon committed $50 billion in an investment round for OpenAI in a major partnership deal. The company also agreed to sell OpenAI's GPT models through Amazon Web Services alongside Anthropic's Claude, and secured the right to integrate OpenAI technology into its own products.

At the same time, signs of a cooling relationship with Anthropic have emerged. The US government recently issued export restrictions barring foreign access to Anthropic's top-tier AI models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5 — a move reportedly triggered by Amazon flagging security concerns about the models.

Internally, Amazon has also grown uneasy about its heavy reliance on Anthropic's AI. AWS executives have expressed concern that too many Amazon products are built on Anthropic's technology, even though Amazon has its own AI model, Nova. They worry that Amazon's products may appear to be little more than a shell layered on top of Anthropic's work.

With Anthropic's model pricing likely to climb further, Amazon is also considering building a lightweight model distilled from Claude, sources said. This approach, commonly known as "distillation," allows a company to create a model that performs comparably to the original while requiring fewer computational resources.

An Amazon spokesperson rebuffed the report, saying the two companies "share a multifaceted partnership built on technical collaboration and will continue to develop the relationship going forward," and that claims suggesting expanded cooperation would raise costs "are not true."

Anthropic also pushed back, saying "the per-unit cost of using Claude to do meaningful work continues to fall with each generation," and that "Amazon is one of our most important partners."