Anthropic is reportedly renegotiating the pricing terms of its artificial intelligence (AI) models with one of its earliest investors, Amazon. A report claims that Amazon may have to pay more to use Anthropic’s AI models after the AI startup revised part of its commercial agreement with the tech giant. Anthropic may have shifted Amazon’s pricing structure from computing hours to AI tokens, a change expected to take effect next year, the report notes.According to a report by The Information, the new arrangement could increase Amazon’s costs for using Anthropic’s AI models across products, including Alexa for Shopping, Kiro and Quick. The report added that Amazon is even evaluating alternative AI models, including OpenAI‘s models and its in-house Nova models, to help manage potential cost increases.The report even highlighted that Amazon has been working to reduce its dependence on Anthropic’s models. AWS executives have reportedly expressed concerns that several Amazon products rely on Anthropic’s technology instead of the company’s own Nova models. Amazon has also introduced options that let customers choose among multiple AI models available through Amazon Bedrock. Depending on the task, the platform can select an appropriate model based on factors including cost and speed.“We picked the right model for the right task. And yes, cost is a consideration, speed is a consideration,” Jiggar Thakkar, vice president of agentic AI for business at AWS, reportedly said in an interview. As per the report, Anthropic and Amazon have also collaborated on technical development, including software contributions that helped improve the usability of Amazon’s Trainium AI chips.
What Amazon said about claims that Anthropic’s new agreement could increase its costs
Responding to the report, Amazon denied that the revised agreement would increase its expenses. An Amazon spokesperson said, “Amazon and Anthropic share a multifaceted partnership grounded in technical collaboration, and we continue to foster that relationship and deepen our work together. It’s incorrect that changes from our expanded collaboration will increase our costs.”Meanwhile, Anthropic said that while billing models have changed for some customers, the overall cost of using its AI models has continued to decline.“The cost of getting important work done with Claude falls every generation. In November 2025, we significantly reduced Opus pricing, and that price has held since, while the models keep getting more capable, so the same budget buys materially more each cycle,” an Anthropic spokesperson said.According to the report, Amazon previously paid Anthropic based on the number of computing hours consumed by its AI models. Under the revised agreement, charges will instead be based on the number of tokens processed, the standard unit for measuring AI model usage. The report noted that Anthropic has also moved other customers from seat-based pricing to usage-based pricing this year, resulting in higher costs for some users.Amazon and Anthropic have maintained a strategic partnership since 2023, when Amazon invested $4 billion in the AI company. As part of the agreement, Anthropic selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and began using Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia AI chips.Earlier this year, Amazon also agreed to invest up to an additional $25 billion in Anthropic. Separately, the company reached an agreement to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, under which AWS will provide infrastructure for OpenAI and distribute its AI models while also gaining access to OpenAI technology for Amazon products.An Anthropic spokesperson noted that the partnership with Amazon continues to expand and said, “Amazon is one of our most important partners, with more than 100,000 customers building with Claude on AWS.”
