OpenAI models coming to Amazon Bedrock: Interview with OpenAI and AWS CEOs (stratechery.com)
276 points by translocator 15 hours ago
spindump8930 14 hours ago
Remember that models on different inference platforms might not necessarily give exactly the same results, adding another axis of non-determinism to development. Things like quantization, custom model serving silicon, batching, or other inference optimizations might mean a model from the original provider performs differently from the hosted one :/
This paper isn't the exact same scenario, since it's an auditable open weight llama model, but shows the symptoms of this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20247
bossyTeacher 13 hours ago
Anyone who has used gpt-x via openai vs microsoft has experienced this very clearly.
energy123 4 hours ago
Which one is better?
dannyw 2 hours ago
weli 3 hours ago
zmmmmm 13 hours ago
Availability through Bedrock has been a major driver in use of Anthropic in my org. And I am betting there is actual margin in it as well.
I wonder if this is directly linked to the split up with Microsoft. Just from my anecdata, OpenAI is getting completely ignored in serious enterprise deployments because what they offer on Azure sucks and there is no other corporate friendly way to get it. They probably saw themselves getting destroyed in enterprise and realised it was existential to be able to compete with Anthropic on AWS.
hobofan an hour ago
May be very dependent on country/region, but in Germany where Azure is quite prevalent in mid-market companies (due to heavy historic reliance on Microsoft in general), OpenAI + Azure seems to have worked as a great synergy. Few customers I've worked are even trying to reach for other providers, as the OpenAI models are available for them and promoted by Azure.
skybrian 13 hours ago
It seems pretty clear that OpenAI renegotiated their agreement in preparation for this:
NikolaosC 2 hours ago
ur probably right on the margin. Anthropic doesn't break it out, but enterprise spend on Bedrock is the highest quality revenue in the AI stack right now. Itzs sticky, multi-year, embedded in existing AWS commits. OpenAI was watching that compound while stuck on Azure
brokencode 11 hours ago
Just curious, what’s wrong with Azure?
zmmmmm 11 hours ago
It might be just our region, but for a long time we couldn't access current frontier models at all. Only old GPT4 level models. Meanwhile, Anthropic is rolling out access to every model within 24 hours of announcement to Bedrock.
7thpower 9 hours ago
jojobas 6 hours ago
jasobake 14 hours ago
As someone who works at big tech and spends countless hours in meetings hoping to get some small feature coordinated for deployment across two teams, I can't imagine the amount of meetings and 6-pagers that were involved in running these models on bedrock's hardware.
33MHz-i486 14 hours ago
at this level they just decide and spin up a swat team to execute it in a couple weeks without politicking. the bureaucratic ways, reviews are just for the low levels, to keep them busy with feature scraps while they mostly do operations
aab99 11 hours ago
yup, I think there are few public articles on aws mantle so you can look it up, but internally this is pretty common knowledge. The entire inference engine of bedrock is built and maintained by a handful of ec2 engineers (all principals and above). Judging by the commit history of the project they are able to just build independent of any of the traditional bureaucracy.
33MHz-i486 10 hours ago
o10449366 13 hours ago
Lol, spinning up swat teams because someone high up decides "drop everything this is my pet priority now" is politicking. It looks good for the leaders, meanwhile its the engineers pulling the all nighters and dealing with having to maintain systems that are operationally compromised from day 0 because there's no proper planning/scoping involved other than "Big Man says this needs to be done in 2 weeks"
tt24 9 hours ago
phillipcarter 13 hours ago
ignoramous 8 hours ago
giancarlostoro 14 hours ago
Depends on how its implemented, but Amazon already did add gpt-oss-20b so if the model is similar enough to the OSS variant of GPT, it might not have been as complicated as you might think.
londons_explore 14 hours ago
I imagine there's lots of custom kernels and optimization...
Openai hasn't been publishing innovations for quite a while.
NamlchakKhandro 13 hours ago
vicchenai 12 hours ago
The enterprise sales motion here is interesting. A lot of regulated industries (finance, healthcare) have existing AWS contracts with data residency commitments baked in. OpenAI on Bedrock basically lets those orgs skip the separate DPA negotiation with OpenAI. Could be a bigger unlock than it looks on paper.
epistasis 14 hours ago
Claude got a looooot more buy in with a lot of privacy-concerned orgs I work with because they could access it through their "trusted" intermediate Amazon. OpenAI has been banned and is not trusted. I'm not sure that I agree with these orgs' legal teams' assessments, but they definitely read the terms of service far closer than I did.
We will see if this changes the equation, but it feels like OpenAI is pretty far behind and playing catch up on all fronts. Though to be honest, "pretty far behind" is like 2-8 weeks in the AI world, so it may not matter a ton, it's mostly perception. And for me and my information bubble, perception of OpenAI is rock-bottom due to Sam Altman. From appearing unethical to appearing unhinged with demands from fabs and everything else, I'm not a fan.
fny 11 hours ago
You can sign ZDR agreements with any of the major LLM providers. Using AWS alone is also not sufficient. Even though AWS is running the model, you need to contact them for proper ZDR.[0]
[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/claude...
PretzelJudge 11 hours ago
Helpful link. Thank you.
I think that when people are worried about ZDR, what they really worry about is data governance. From what I’ve seen there’s a general distrust of OpenAI. AWS may keep your data around (without formal ZDR) but the concern of governance (using your data to train without your consent) seems like it would be much lower, because any breach of contract at AWS would have potential to destroy trust in what’s already a massively profitable company, so the incentives just aren’t there.
I’m not claiming OpenAI is training on API data. Just that they don’t have as strong of an incentive not to as AWS.
donavanm 9 hours ago
bg24 11 hours ago
While Anthopic has the best model and a focussed (no disturbance, lawsuits) leadership, they got a lot of enterprise access due to AWS. It is mutual no doubt, with both sides benefitting. The culture of feedback loop of AWS customers would have helped them in getting to enterprise-ready faster. Just my hypothesis.
stingraycharles 8 hours ago
But Azure is just as big, if not equally big, in Enterprise. The argument that Azure didn’t give them enough access within enterprises doesn’t make sense to me.
dannyw 2 hours ago
consumer451 12 hours ago
Legally, SLA, and data concern-wise, is this any better than OpenAI on Azure? That has been around for a while.
PretzelJudge 11 hours ago
By default you can’t access the latest OpenAI models unless you request access. We requested access for a very straightforward use case and never got it. We switched to Anthropic and Bedrock for that reason.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 11 hours ago
You don’t have to use Azure.
outside1234 14 hours ago
The thing they are really wildly behind on is a business model. They are losing wild amounts of money per customer and it is hard to see how the competitive situation is going to allow them to fix that.
echelon 14 hours ago
Given the scaling hurdles Claude Code / Opus is having, those Anthropic customers might leave to Codex. I'm _this_ close.
jwilliams 14 hours ago
epistasis 14 hours ago
ribosometronome 14 hours ago
johnbarron 13 hours ago
It just not about AWS being some "trusted intermediary"... it's that the model runs inside the customer own AWS account under a different contract. AWS explicitly states inputs/outputs are not shared with model providers and are not used to train base models [1]
And for OpenAI, there is a May 2025 preservation order in NYT v. OpenAI. The court is forcing OpenAI to retain ChatGPT output logs indefinitely, including chats users have deleted that would normally be purged within 30 days [2]. That makes it a non starter for HIPAA/GDPR bound orgs.
hn_throwaway_99 12 hours ago
I'm confused, your own #2 link says that Open AI is not bound to store output logs indefinitely going forward:
> Update on October 22, 2025:
> After months of litigation, we are no longer under a legal order to retain consumer ChatGPT and API content indefinitely. Our obligations under the earlier order ended on September 26, 2025.
> We’ve returned to our standard data retention practices :
> Deleted ChatGPT conversations and Temporary Chats will be automatically deleted from our systems within 30 days (opens in a new window).
> API data will also be automatically deleted after 30 days.
TZubiri 8 hours ago
It's like Coca-Cola being banned at a school, and then Pepsi getting some contracts with the cafeteria because of it.
giancarlostoro 14 hours ago
They're also not focused exclusively only on building an LLM, they have video and image generation too. Anthropic has one single focus, and this is why they are usually at the very top in the SWE benchmarks.
phillipcarter 14 hours ago
Isn't it the case that OpenAI and Anthropic regularly just swap for whoever is at the top of the latest benchmarks? They're also so close in scores that it's effectively a wash anyways.
What OP is referring to is Anthropic aligning with corporate terms and conditions early, positioning themselves to be effectively resold by AWS rather than requiring orgs to procure them directly. This is huge in the enterprise world because the processes to get broad approval are generally far smaller and shorter for "just another AWS service" compared to a whole new vendor.
djtriptych 12 hours ago
Grimblewald 12 hours ago
epistasis 14 hours ago
IMHO the benchmarks aren't useful, and ranking among the frontier models is mostly noise. The extra features around the coding agent have a much bigger impact on productivity than having to provide slightly more specification and guidance to the models; a 90% success rate versus a 92% success rate on the tasks I ask it to do is far more influenced by what I say than what the model is capable of.
DrewADesign 12 hours ago
Didn’t they say Sora will only be used to internally create training data? Integrated image generation seems more in the neat feature category than some fundamental advantage, but maybe someone has use cases I haven’t considered.
hn_throwaway_99 12 hours ago
Open AI is killing Sora though, so it looks like they are looking at Anthropic's playbook of focusing on enterprise use cases and seeing that it's more profitable.
dannyw 2 hours ago
NikolaosC 2 hours ago
OpenAI just gave up Azure exclusivity, killed the AGI clause, and stopped paying Microsoft revenue share to get on AWS. Anthropic figured out 18 m ago that enterprises buy from their cloud, not from the best model. OpenAI is just catching up.
quibono 2 hours ago
Just waiting for Gemma 4, DeepSeek 4 now. Then the only thing I'll be able to complain about is the completely different API to interface with (unless they FINALLY move to full OpenAI support).
nijave 14 hours ago
This would be a nice compliance win. One less sub-processor and all our data is already on AWS so less worrying about sending it off somewhere else
KaiserPro 13 hours ago
Great, I can now buy openAI through AWS with an interface that is totally incompatible with all my tools (unless AWS have finally given up and just made bedrock useful by adopting openAPI finally)
ManishR 10 hours ago
Product Manager for Bedrock Mantle here. We now have bedrock-mantle endpoint which supports OpenAI API compatibility with Responses and Chat Completions support. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/endpoin...
KaiserPro 3 hours ago
Oh snap, excellent!
Silfen 9 hours ago
2001zhaozhao 14 hours ago
The market might be increasingly hard on AI startups in general as enterprises adopt providers like Amazon Bedrock and refuse to sign other deals.
lwarfield 14 hours ago
Well that didn't take long.
avaer 13 hours ago
It probably did, but the PR stream that the public sees is a well oiled machine.
This HN post itself has 4 simultaneous announcement links; not a coincidence.
There are billions of investor money on the line if the wrong thing is said at the wrong time, it needs to be carefully crafted and staged.
brazukadev 12 hours ago
I guess OpenAI's CFO didn't get the memo[0].
0. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/04/28/tech-shares-fall-after...
chopete3 5 hours ago
This is a big news for AWS hosted products.
Microsoft Azure has been the worst interms of maintaining a highly available service and also managing predictable latency.
Their azure customer support is bad. Not ready for any real enterprise cloud offering. They behave like Comcast customer support.
It was absolutely idiotic to lock it down to Azure. It wasn't meant to be an iphone+at&t combo where the phone is an end all be all.
A cloud product depends on a lot of services and nobody would switch cloud providers for a candy.
throw03172019 15 hours ago
OpenAI frontier models coming to Bedrock soon?
karmasimida 15 hours ago
> Starting today, @awscloud and OpenAI are bringing the latest OpenAI models to Amazon Bedrock, launching Codex on Amazon Bedrock, and launching Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (all in limited preview). AWS and OpenAI will continue to bring the latest advances to Amazon Bedrock—so the models and agents you build with today continue to benefit from new breakthroughs as they arrive.
dang 15 hours ago
We've updated the title above to make that clearer.
Since the product doesn't seem to be available yet, and the other links are all press releases, we'll leave the interview up as the main link.
echelon 14 hours ago
This doesn't mean you have the raw model weights, right? That's still entirely hidden / opaque?
You can just run "air gapped" inference?
Is this only of interest to enterprise customers already on AWS (who want "air gapped" behavior)? Is there any other use case for this?
This will be more expensive than calling OpenAI directly, right?
kube-system 13 hours ago
A lot of companies already have data processing agreements and compliance sign-off for using AWS. Many are hesitant to send their data to AI startups with an incentive to train their models and a history of being.... loose with how they intake training data. Even when they do give assurances otherwise. AWS is more trusted in this aspect.
If this ends up similar to Claude on Bedrock, it's the same price.
londons_explore 14 hours ago
This is for people who don't trust openAI with their data, but do trust Amazon.
But it also is for Devs in a company who already have a blanket agreement with Amazon, but would have an uphill battle signing an agreement with openAI.
mochow13 10 hours ago
OpenAI is tailgating Anthropic apparently.
shevy-java 13 hours ago
Now they are ruining amazon too. It's fascinating to see.
AI is kind of like the ultimate corporation drug. They are all on it. And can't get rid of it - ever again.
unreal6 10 hours ago
How are they "ruining" Amazon with these launches? That is not clear to me.
try-working 11 hours ago
OpenAI marching towards its future as a dumb pipe.