OpenAI's Open-Weight Models Now Available on AWS, Marking a Significant Shift in AI Partnerships

For the first time, OpenAI models are available on AWS | TechCrunch

Sam Altman's blow torch to his competitors is so hot, it even includes a new partnership with Amazon Web Services. As OpenAI announced two open-weight reasoning models with capabilities on par with its o-series, Amazon announced that the new models would soon be available as a service on AWS. For the first time, OpenAI models will be available as a choice to power Amazon AI services like Bedrock and SageMaker AI. While anyone can download the models via Hugging Face, Amazon didn't just grab the models to offer them as an AWS service on their own. This is a partnership with OpenAI, as Dmitry Pimenov, the model maker's product lead, indicated in the announcement. This is a juicy competitive move for both companies. For AWS, it finally puts the cloud giant in the same sentence as the biggest model maker, OpenAI. Until now, AWS has best been known as a major host and a financial backer of Anthropic's Claude, one of OpenAI's biggest competitors. AWS offers Claude, along with other models from makers including Cohere, DeepSeek, Meta, and Mistral, as well as its own home-grown ones in its AI services. Specifically, Bedrock allows AWS customers to build and host GenAI apps using models of their choice. Sagemaker, on the other hand, allows AWS customers to train, or even build their own, AI models largely for analytics uses. While AWS's ultimate rival, Microsoft, hasn't had a lock on OpenAI models since January, Azure is still OpenAI's most significant cloud partner to date. OpenAI even announced that Microsoft is offering versions of these two new models, too, optimized for Windows devices. Watching Microsoft win an increasing amount of cloud business with OpenAI has been a public pain in Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy's neck. Just last week during Amazon's quarterly earnings call, Jassy was pounded with questions from Wall Street analysts about how the company was losing ground in AI to competitors, particularly Microsoft. For instance, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth asked Jassy to explain "significantly faster cloud growth among the number two and number three players in the space," referring to Microsoft and Google. Later, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak told Jassy that Wall Street thinks "AWS is falling behind in GenAI with concerns about share loss, peers, etc." Jassy responded with a minutes-long diatribe that included this barb at Redmond: "I think the second player is about 65% of the size of the AWS." Meanwhile, another AWS competitor, Oracle, reported that it signed a $30 billion a year deal with OpenAI to offer data center services. This means that OpenAI plans to pay Oracle more each year than all of its other cloud services customers combined. Until now, AWS had been left out of any OpenAI-related glory. As for how such a move with AWS benefits OpenAI: The AI provider's relationship with Microsoft is notoriously strained, as the two are reportedly renegotiating their long-term partnership deal. What better way for OpenAI to strengthen its position than to cozy up the biggest cloud provider, even if, initially, on a small scale? In addition, this partnership allows swaths of AWS enterprise customers to easily experiment with using OpenAI models with their hosted AI apps. All while Altman gets to undercut Meta's Mark Zuckerberg with this move as well. As OpenAI releases these two high-performing models under an Apache 2.0 open source license, Meta recently admitted that it probably won't continue to open source all of its upcoming "superintelligence" models. AWS did not immediately respond to our request for additional comment.

Amazon will offer OpenAI's open-weight models, sidestepping Microsoft via Apache 2.0 license

OpenAI released its first open-weight AI models in more than five years, and Amazon quickly said they will be available on its Bedrock and SageMaker platforms -- the first time the cloud giant has offered products from the ChatGPT maker. The surprise announcement comes at a pivotal moment in OpenAI's longstanding relationship with Microsoft, which has invested about $13.75 billion in the San Francisco-based company. Microsoft has exclusive rights to OpenAI's API on its Azure cloud platform. OpenAI says the new models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, are state-of-the-art language models with advanced reasoning capabilities. Their status as open-weight models means that the underlying parameters, or weights, that determine their behavior are freely available for download. This lets developers and companies customize, fine-tune, and deploy the models for themselves. The new models are available under the Apache 2.0 free software license, which means they aren't subject to the exclusive provisions of OpenAI's Microsoft technology agreement. As a result, any cloud provider could offer them -- although it's clear from the timing that Amazon got a heads up, at least. Amazon trumpeted the news, saying that the availability of the models on Amazon Web Services "will put more powerful AI technologies into the hands of organizations and expand the impact of OpenAI's leading technology by making it available to the millions of customers on AWS, the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud." OpenAI said as part of its announcement that Microsoft is bringing GPU-optimized versions of the smaller gpt-oss-20b model to Windows devices. We've contacted Microsoft for further comment on the news and its plans. Amazon Web Services has likely lost some business in the past due to the fact that it didn't have any OpenAI models to offer, said Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "While these aren't the best OpenAI models, they are a start," Moorhead said via email. "Microsoft will continue to have the best Open AI models out there, but they now have some competition with different modalities." Amazon's Bedrock platform offers customers a wide selection of AI models from various companies. In part as a response to Microsoft's OpenAI partnership, Amazon has invested $8 billion in its partner Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, and offers the startup's models on the platform. Microsoft and OpenAI are currently in talks to renegotiate their agreement in a deal that could give Microsoft ongoing access to critical OpenAI technology, even if the startup achieves its goal of building artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a Bloomberg News report last week. The talks have reportedly expanded into a larger renegotiation. One key issue is the size of Microsoft's equity stake as OpenAI converts to a for-profit entity.

OpenAI's AWS partnership goes deeper with open models designed for AI agents, coding, and long-form thinking

Apache 2.0 licensing may encourage broader experimentation in regions with strict data requirements OpenAI has released two open-weight models, gpt-oss-120B and gpt-oss-20B, positioning them as direct challengers to offerings like DeepSeek-R1 and other large language learning models (LLMs) currently shaping the AI ecosystem. These models are now available on AWS through its Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI platforms. This marks OpenAI's entry into the open-weight model segment, a space that until now has been dominated by competitors such as Mistral AI and Meta. The gpt-oss-120B model runs on a single 80 GB GPU, while the 20B version targets edge environments with only 16 GB of memory required. OpenAI claims both models deliver strong reasoning performance, matching or exceeding its o4-mini model on key benchmarks. However, external evaluations are not yet available, leaving actual performance across varied workloads open to scrutiny. What distinguishes these models is not only their size, but also the license. Released under Apache 2.0, they are intended to lower access barriers and support broader AI development, particularly in high-security or resource-limited environments. According to OpenAI, this move aligns with its broader mission to make artificial intelligence tools more widely usable across industries and geographies. On AWS, the models are integrated into enterprise infrastructure via Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling the creation of AI agents capable of performing complex workflows. OpenAI suggests these models are suitable for tasks like code generation, scientific reasoning, and multi-step problem-solving, especially where adjustable reasoning and chain-of-thought outputs are required. Their 128K context window also supports longer interactions, such as document analysis or technical support tasks. The models also integrate with developer tooling, supporting platforms like vLLM, llama.cpp, and Hugging Face. With features like Guardrails and upcoming support for custom model import and knowledge bases, OpenAI and AWS are pitching this as a developer-ready foundation for building scalable AI applications. Still, the release feels partly strategic, positioning OpenAI as a key player in open model infrastructure, while also tethering its technology more closely to Amazon Web Services, a dominant force in cloud computing.

Amazon will offer OpenAI models to customers for first time - The Economic Times

Amazon plans to provide OpenAI's AI models to its users. This marks the first time Amazon will offer products from the AI startup. The models will be available on Bedrock and Sagemaker platforms. These models can perform complex tasks. Amazon aims to compete with other tech giants in AI. Amazon shares saw a rise.Amazon.com Inc. plans to make OpenAI's new open artificial intelligence models available to customers, the first time the cloud computing giant has offered products from the leading AI startup. The models can mimic the human process of reasoning, months after China's DeepSeek gained global attention with its own open AI software. Amazon said it will offer the tools on its Bedrock and Sagemaker platforms, adding that their advanced reasoning capabilities make them suited for AI agents. OpenAI announced the new "open weight" models on Tuesday and said they can carry out complex tasks like writing code and looking up information online on a user's behalf. Amid perceptions that Amazon is lagging behind its Big Tech peers in artificial intelligence, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy has positioned Amazon Web Services as a kind of supermarket that sells a range of AI tools to businesses. The company's Bedrock software platform was designed to make it easier to access other companies' large language models, as well as Amazon's own. The company has partnered with Anthropic, investing $8 billion in the AI startup and using the relationship to bolster its credentials in AI services. AWS offers Anthropic's Claude models to clients on its AI marketplace. Anthropic plans to release a new version of its most powerful AI model on Tuesday that the company claims is more capable at coding, research and data analysis. Amazon shares rose 1.5% at 1:22 p.m. in New York. Amazon last week projected weaker-than-expected operating incoming for the current quarter and trailed the sales growth of its main cloud rivals, leaving investors looking for signs that the company's huge investments in AI are paying off. During the second quarter, AWS revenue grew a little more than 17% to $30.9 billion, barely surpassing analysts' average estimate of $30.8 billion. Amazon last year named Matt Garman the cloud division's CEO. A longtime AWS engineering leader who was previously sales chief, Garman succeeded Adam Selipsky.

AWS Offers OpenAI's Models on Its Platform for the First Time | PYMNTS.com

OpenAI is considered the marquee brand in AI, but its models have only been available in the cloud on Microsoft Azure. All of OpenAI's proprietary AI models are contractually exclusive to Microsoft, its early and largest investor. "I am happy to announce the availability of two new OpenAI models with open weights" are now available on two of AWS' platforms, he wrote in the post. AWS created a landing page image featuring their two logos side by side, usually reserved for partners jointly announcing an alliance. While anyone can access all of OpenAI's models directly through its API rather than going through Microsoft Azure or AWS, enterprises need the robust compliance, security and expertise that hyperscalers provide. However, OpenAI's open-weight models are not truly open source in the sense that users cannot access the code and see what dataset was used to assess it for bias and other harms. OpenAI offered them under the Apache 2.0 license that lets anyone use, modify and distribute the models if there is proper attribution and a built-in grant of patent rights. "OpenAI's open-weight models may not represent the 'leading-edge' models" with capabilities "more similar" to a lightweight version of the flagship GPT-4 model, but they "do fit well with Amazon's cost savings strategy," wrote BofA analyst Justin Post in a research note shared with PYMNTS. AWS said in its Tuesday blog post that OpenAI's larger open-weight model gives enterprises 10 times more value for the price versus a comparable Gemini model, 18 times more than DeepSeek R1, and seven times over OpenAI's o4 model. (Gemini and OpenAI o4-mini are proprietary; DeepSeek is open source.) Poccia said in his blog post that the models "excel at coding, scientific analysis and mathematical reasoning, with performance comparable to leading alternatives." The models also work with external tools and can be used in an "agentic workflow." AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon, already offers open models such as Meta's Llama, DeepSeek and Mistral. It also offers Claude from Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested $8 billion. Claude, a main rival of OpenAI's AI models, was not mentioned in the AWS press release. "We see the addition of OpenAI to the AWS platform, while far from a comprehensive deal, as a positive initial step in the relationship, suggesting the companies are interested in working together," Post said.