OpenAI Touts Amazon Partnership in Shift Away From Microsoft

OpenAI is reportedly enjoying the fruits of its partnership with Amazon.

As CNBC reported Monday (April 13), company revenue chief Denise Dresser praised the collaboration in a memo to staff Sunday (April 12), while also pointing out the limitations of OpenAI’s long-running relationship with Microsoft.

“Our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success. But it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock,” Dresser said in the memo, which was seen by CNBC, referencing Amazon Web Services’ platform that gives companies access to AI models.

“Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering,” Dresser added.

Under the terms of the deal with Amazon, the eCommerce giant will invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI. Microsoft, Amazon’s chief cloud competitor, has invested upwards of $13 billion in OpenAI, a relationship that began years before ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom.

A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment when reached by PYMNTS.

The CNBC report characterized OpenAI as “desperate” to capture market share in the enterprise space, where Anthropic has established itself as the leader of late. According to the report, the rise of Anthropic’s Claude model was a popular topic at AI industry conference HumanX in San Francisco last week.

Arvind Jain, chief executive of enterprise AI startup Glean, described it as “Claude mania” in an interview at the event.

“It has become a religion, that’s the level of that mania,” said Jain.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic, the report added, are working to sell investors on their respective strengths as they prepare to go public, possibly later this year. OpenAI was valued at more than $850 billion in a record funding round in late March, while investors valued Anthropic at $380 billion in a February round.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote Monday on some of the diverging viewpoints about the role of AI in enterprise settings. For example, a recent BetaNews article said the most valuable role for enterprise agentic AI is in work that combines repeated tasks with decisions that adhere to clear business rules.

IBM, meanwhile, contended that the agentic enterprise will be defined less by any one AI model and more by the partnerships connecting models, data, workflows and governance. A blog post last week argued companies will not gain the most value from agents on their own, but from combining different strengths across providers so AI can shift from giving answers “to carrying out work inside real business processes,” the report added.