AWS CEO defends dual investments in Anthropic and OpenAI

Speaking at the HumanX conference in San Francisco, AWS CEO Matt Garman defended the cloud giant’s strategy of investing in both Anthropic and OpenAI. Garman, who started at Amazon as an intern in 2005 before the launch of AWS in 2006, argued that investing in both companies is an acceptable conflict of interest. When addressing the inherent conflict of working with AI model companies that are fierce (and, arguably, sometimes petty) competitors, Garman asserted that AWS has deep experience competing with its own partners. He explained that AWS has built this capability over its history. “So, for a very long time, we’ve built this muscle up of how we go to market with our partners,” said Garman, the CEO of AWS. He added that AWS may also develop first-party products—products built by the platform provider itself—that compete with partners, but has promised not to give itself an unfair competitive advantage.

This approach of competing with partners has been part of AWS’s model since its early years, when the unit realized it could not build every cloud offering itself. Garman recounted that AWS knew from the beginning it would have to compete with its partners because technology is interconnected. Today, this dynamic is playing out in the artificial intelligence sector, where cloud giants are increasingly offering AI model-routing services. These are services that automatically route tasks to different AI models to optimize performance and lower costs. Garman explained that customers might use one model for planning, another for reasoning, and a cheaper model for simpler tasks like code completion. He noted that he believes this is where the world will go.

The strategy is driven by the competitive landscape. For AWS, its $50 billion investment in OpenAI—following its $8 billion investment in Anthropic—was described as almost a matter of life and death to keep pace with its cloud rival Microsoft, as both models were already available on Microsoft’s cloud. Meanwhile, overlapping investor interests have become common across the industry. When Anthropic announced its latest $30 billion funding round in February, the round included investors who also back OpenAI, such as Microsoft.

Why it matters

AWS’s willingness to back competing AI models reflects a broader industry shift where cloud giants prioritize model availability and routing over exclusive partnerships to maintain market dominance. By offering multiple competing models, cloud providers can keep their platforms central to enterprise AI adoption.