OpenAI apes AWS Marketplace while Anthropic remains stubbornly Microsoftian

By including Baseten in its marketplace, OpenAI signals it wants its models to win on the merits, not through coercion

OpenAI’s DevDay keynote was this week, and it featured a cameo mention of everyone’s favorite underpants merchant who also sells databases, AWS. I saw Simon Willison’s liveblog comment and felt very seen: “My eyes glazed over a bit at the AWS partnership section, but it only lasted a few seconds.”

With today's more interesting but also largely unheralded announcement, you can now retire your OpenAI spend commitments via a list of (at launch) 32 partners, just like the AWS Marketplace has done for years.

The last cloud war was fought over who got to run the customer’s infrastructure. The next one will be fought over who gets to steer the customer’s next purchase.

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OpenAI plays chess while Anthropic eats checkers

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OpenAI is making a fascinating play here. By making its Codex harness open-source, and including Baseten in its marketplace for access to open models, OpenAI is effectively saying “we hope our models win on their merits, not because we'll break your thumbs if you use others.”

The Baseten partnership is itself the most interesting one they've trotted out; it's the first real sign we've seen from OpenAI that they view open models (that they themselves have not released) as anything other than an existential threat. This is going to become a massive bellwether as to whether the "Open" in their name is words on a page, or a deeper philosophy.

Distribution will almost certainly matter more than a temporary lead in model quality. OpenAI seems to understand that, and lets you use subsidized subscription accounts with other tools. Anthropic disagrees; if you try to use a Claude Pro account with OpenCode, you will shortly find that you no longer have a working Claude Pro account. It's almost Microsoftian.

Strong-arm edicts around how your product must be used or integrated into workflows only lead to success in the minds of executives who also think AWS is a leader in AI; that is to say, “their company has a SharePoint server.” For the rest of us, there is no obvious durable advantage that either of the two frontier labs can sustain over one another on the model front. OpenAI is clearly the first to recognize that its ability to steer the customer’s next purchase decision is a power all its own.

There are substantial caveats

The fine print is never as tidy as the glossy brochure suggests. While specific terms are only available within enterprise OpenAI accounts, the details that have been publicly exposed so far show that they’re being cautious at launch. Only a fixed percentage of spend up to a cap applies; eligibility is specific to the customer, product, and purchase in question; and curiously the billing is direct through the partner, with OpenAI handling commitment reconciliation on their end separately. There’s no self-service here, and thus zero publicly testable indication yet as to what types of spend (if indeed any) make it through the approval gauntlet.

But assuming it takes off, vendors will gain access to customers and committed budget that's already been allocated, which is super for them. In exchange, they risk depending on OpenAI’s eligibility decisions and discovery mechanisms; if this takes off, the odds are terrific that Baseten will not be the only open model provider in the marketplace, and, just like the cloud providers before them, OpenAI's marketplace will follow the natural evolution of such things and begin eating its partners.

This means that we're heading for a showdown. You can imagine that many customers will have obligations to both AWS and OpenAI. Which agreement will get the credit for a third-party purchase? More interestingly, who at the customer is going to be the one who ultimately controls that decision: engineering, procurement, finance — or the vendor’s account team? This is something that every AWS customer with an enterprise account team in place struggles with.

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To that end, I’ve felt for a while that the model labs are becoming this generation’s cloud providers, while the cloud providers are becoming this generation’s IBM. IBM does an awful lot of stuff (I know, I know, it's valuable! Please do not send me a fax!), almost none of it headline-making. But those deals trend towards getting signed on a golf course with an enterprise sales team, not on the IBM website at 3AM because you're trying to solve a problem. While the company still has some money-printing machines in it, Big Blue's days of being the center of the tech universe are long gone, and were it to go out of business tomorrow, some of its divisions would apparently not realize it for at least five years. It's part of the furniture, not the driver of technology adoption.

Meanwhile, the "we're throwing a bunch of stuff out there, keeping track of what we release is rapidly becoming a full-time job, and things that sucked yesterday are suddenly smooth sailing today" has become squarely the province of the frontier labs.

The war for enterprise relevance

Allowing competing models into the ecosystem doesn't necessarily demonstrate philosophical enlightenment. It can serve to make larger OpenAI commitments more palatable ("Hey, if we aren't going to use up all of our commitment we can burn it on other vendors!"), attract more vendors into OpenAI's partnership program to absorb that overflow spend, and give customers fewer reasons to leave. OpenAI's marketplace puts it in a position to benefit from decisions well beyond model selection; its contract becomes a consideration when customers choose other software.

AWS's risk here is compatible with continued financial success. More agents will presumably mean more AWS consumption. But the customer might increasingly start with OpenAI, select a variety of tools through its ecosystem, and only encounter AWS as an implementation detail, not materially different than a datacenter provider.

Simon Willison tuning out the AWS mention in the keynote isn't evidence of AWS's decline. But it does show that AWS turning up was incredibly easy to miss, while the stuff that matters to enterprise buyers may one day be looked back upon as a passing of a torch. ®