Anthropic renegotiated part of its partnership with Amazon to bill based on tokens rather than compute hours starting next year, a change that could significantly raise what Amazon pays to use Claude across products like Alexa for Shopping, coding tool Kiro, and workplace assistant Quick, according to The Information. The shift has Amazon evaluating whether it can cut costs by leaning on OpenAI’s models or its own Nova line, with some engineers proactively distilling Anthropic models to cheaper internal versions. Amazon disputed that the change raises its costs, while Anthropic said the overall cost of getting work done with Claude falls every generation. The renegotiation lands as Amazon cozies up to OpenAI with an investment of up to $50B, even as it committed up to $25B more to Anthropic.
