Amazon Could Pay More for Anthropic Under Token-Based Deal

The latest twist in the Amazon-Anthropic relationship is a quiet billing change, not a product launch. The Information reported that under the expanded deal Amazon struck with Anthropic in April, Amazon will pay for Anthropic models based on the number of tokens consumed rather than the number of computing hours used. The report says the shift could significantly increase Amazon's spending on Anthropic's models. An Amazon spokesperson pushed back, saying it is incorrect that changes from the expanded collaboration will increase costs.

The April agreement put up to $25 billion of fresh Amazon investment into Anthropic, $5 billion immediately and up to $20 billion tied to milestones, alongside Anthropic's commitment to spend more than $100 billion on AWS technologies over 10 years and a plan to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Trainium compute capacity for training and serving Claude. The pricing change matters because of how revenue flows differently across the AWS catalog. When an AWS customer runs Claude on Bedrock, Amazon has to split the revenue with Anthropic. When a customer runs Amazon's own Nova family, Amazon keeps 100% of the money.

That gap is the backdrop for why Amazon SVP Peter DeSantis has been so public about closing the frontier-model gap. He told CNBC in June that Amazon's own models haven't been at the very frontier for the very largest, most demanding workloads, but that he hopes Amazon will compete with Anthropic and OpenAI on frontier capability in the coming year, leaning on custom silicon and a customer base of around 50,000 enterprises using Nova2. DeSantis's own line is that AI has a cost problem, and the vertically integrated chip-plus-model stack is Amazon's answer.

The honest caveat is that this is single-sourced reporting on a contract Amazon disputes. What the reporting doesn't give you is which Amazon products use Claude heavily enough for token pricing to actually bite, how much the new arrangement is offset by Anthropic's own AWS spend pledge, or whether any consumer or seller-facing features have already been rerouted to Nova. Those are the moves to watch as the next Nova release, and Bedrock's quiet routing defaults, unfold.