Amazon AI chief admits models lag OpenAI and Anthropic, aims to catch up within a year

Amazon has lagged OpenAI and Anthropic, but AI chief sees path to catch up in 'coming year'

Amazon's DeSantis: Aiming to compete with frontier AI labs within a year Amazon's top artificial intelligence executive told CNBC on Wednesday that he hopes the company will be able to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic on frontier models in the "coming year" after falling behind the two leading labs. "I think it's a fair narrative that our models haven't been at the very frontier for the very largest, most demanding workloads," Peter DeSantis, a senior vice president at Amazon who heads up the company's semiconductor, AI and quantum efforts, told CNBC. The "frontier" refers to the most advanced AI models. "We've been taking a very deliberate approach to get our foundations right, our data, our architecture, our infrastructure. And you know, we're on a path that we want to be on," he said. The aspiration underscores the effort Amazon is putting into its model development as it looks to reassure investors that it is a key player in the AI boom. Amazon's approach to AI models has been two-pronged. On the one hand, it has a product called Bedrock, which is a sort of marketplace for models from different companies that its cloud computing customers can access. On the other hand, Amazon released Nova2, its latest AI model, in December in a bid to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. "We've got about 50,000 customers for Nova2, so we're pretty excited about it," DeSantis said. "Our aspiration is to have a model that people think about as one of the very most capable intelligent models out there," he said. "I'm not sure we're there yet with Nova2, but that's our aspiration."

Amazon AI chief admits models lag OpenAI and Anthropic

Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis admitted the company's models "haven't been at the very frontier" and said he hopes to catch up within a year. The candour comes as Amazon simultaneously invests $33 billion in Anthropic while building its own rival models. Amazon's AI chief has said what the market long suspected. Peter DeSantis, the senior vice president who oversees the company's AI models, custom chips, and quantum computing, told CNBC that Amazon's models "haven't been at the very frontier for the very largest, most demanding workloads." He added that he hopes Amazon will be "in the conversation about leading models in the coming year." The admission frames a catch-up effort that will rely on custom silicon, proprietary data, and the scale of Amazon's cloud infrastructure. The dual strategy Amazon runs two AI plays simultaneously. Bedrock, its model marketplace, lets cloud customers access models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral through a single service, generating revenue regardless of whose model wins. Nova2, Amazon's in-house model released in December, has attracted roughly 50,000 customers. It has not matched the capabilities of Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on the most demanding enterprise and research workloads, hence DeSantis's candour. The investor hedge Amazon has committed up to $33 billion in Anthropic, including a $25 billion deal signed in April that gave Anthropic access to up to five gigawatts of compute on Amazon's Trainium chips. In return, Anthropic pledged to spend more than $100 billion on AWS over the next decade. The arrangement means Amazon profits from Anthropic's success through both its equity stake and the cloud revenue Anthropic generates. Amazon's Q1 2026 earnings were inflated by a $16.8 billion Anthropic-related gain, even as the company's free cash flow fell 95%. The competitive dynamics are pointed. Google has pledged up to $40 billion in Anthropic, making the AI lab the most courted startup in Silicon Valley. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also reportedly triggered the US government crackdown that shut down Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 last week. The episode raised questions about how Amazon balances its role as Anthropic's largest investor with its position as a competitor building rival models. The catch-up plan DeSantis's path to closing the gap centres on custom AI chips, proprietary training data drawn from Amazon's retail and logistics operations, and the engineering scale of a team that now spans frontier models, silicon design, and quantum research. Amazon's Trainium chips already power most of Bedrock's inference workloads. Trainium3, due later this year, promises four times the performance of its predecessor. Jeff Bezos's separate physical AI lab, Project Prometheus, is raising up to $10 billion, signalling that the company's AI ambitions extend well beyond cloud computing. Whether custom chips and proprietary data can overcome a multi-year head start from labs that have spent billions training frontier models remains the open question. DeSantis offered a timeline, "the coming year," but no benchmarks to measure it against.