There is speculation that expense burdens could grow as Amazon, the world's largest cloud corporations, renegotiates a contract to use Anthropic's artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The Information, a U.S. information technology (IT) outlet, reported on the 29th, citing multiple sources, that Amazon and Anthropic revised parts of their contract terms early this year. The two companies reportedly decided to change the way Anthropic's AI models are billed to Amazon starting next year from a computation time basis to a token usage basis.
A token is a unit for AI computation; in English, one word is generally about 1.3 tokens.
With this billing overhaul, Amazon's AI service operating expense may rise. Amazon is loading Anthropic's AI models into consumer and corporations products such as the shopping assistant tool "Alexa for Shopping," the coding tool "Q," and the workplace tool "Quicksight." Because more usage leads to more processed tokens, the expense burden could grow compared with before.
Some in the industry also interpret the billing overhaul as a chance for Amazon to accelerate efforts to reduce its reliance on Anthropic. Amazon has worked with Anthropic, a core investment destination and key partner, but it has been rapidly expanding ties with OpenAI this year.
In Feb., Amazon formed a major partnership by committing a $50 billion (about 77 trillion won) investment in OpenAI's funding round. In addition to Anthropic's Claude, it also decided to sell OpenAI's GPT models on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and secured rights to embed OpenAI technology in its own products.
By contrast, there are also signs it is keeping some distance from Anthropic. It is known that recent U.S. government export control guidance barring foreign access to Anthropic's top-tier AI models "Mythos 5" and "Fable 5" was prompted by an Amazon report flagging security risks.
There are also concerns within Amazon that it relies too heavily on Anthropic's AI models. AWS executives view as a problem the fact that, even though Amazon has its own AI model "Nova," there are too many products based on Anthropic's technology.
Amazon is also reportedly reviewing building a lightweight model based on the Claude model to prepare for the possibility that fees for Anthropic's AI models will become more expensive. This is the so-called "distillation" method, which creates a model that preserves much of a large model's performance while using fewer compute resources.
An Amazon Spokesperson, responding to these reports, said, "Amazon and Anthropic share a multifaceted partnership based on technological collaboration, and we will continue to further develop the relationship," adding, "The claim that changes accompanying expanded collaboration will increase expense is not true."
Anthropic also said, "The unit cost of performing important tasks using Claude is decreasing with each generation," adding, "Amazon is one of our most important partners."