Amazon said it is expanding its partnership with OpenAI, positioning the new effort around Amazon Web Services and a push toward AI agents that can carry out tasks on computers. The company described the move as a “major expansion” of its collaboration with the ChatGPT maker and announced it at an event in San Francisco, where OpenAI’s CEO addressed the audience through a prerecorded video message.
In the video, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the collaboration with AWS would involve co-developing “a new platform for AI agents” designed to “do computer-based work on people’s behalf.” Altman said the goal was tied to how such systems need to function inside customer businesses, including running reliably, scaling, and meeting security needs that companies already expect from their existing cloud providers.
Altman delivered the remarks at the same time as he was appearing in federal court across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland in a civil trial tied to a lawsuit filed by rival OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk. The AP report placed the Amazon announcement alongside that courtroom appearance, highlighting how OpenAI’s corporate and legal fights are unfolding while it pursues new technology partnerships.
Microsoft, meanwhile, said Monday it would no longer pay a share of its revenue to OpenAI. That move marked what Microsoft described as another step in untethering a relationship that helped power the rise of ChatGPT and that has also been a source of competition and leverage as OpenAI sells its AI products to business customers.
OpenAI has said it relied exclusively on Microsoft’s cloud investments to build the technology that made ChatGPT a household name, and it has also built products such as Microsoft’s Copilot on OpenAI technology. But the partnership has shifted as OpenAI—founded as a nonprofit—moved toward a more capitalistic structure and began balancing Microsoft ties with other cloud partners including Amazon, Google and Oracle.
OpenAI said Monday it would continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030, though it said the rate will be capped. Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, also spoke at the Amazon event, according to the AP report.
Both companies said products made by OpenAI will ship first on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. Altman suggested in his remarks Tuesday that Amazon has those capabilities, arguing that AI agent systems need infrastructure customers already trust for their most important workloads.
“These systems need to run reliably and robustly,” Altman said in the video. “They need to be secure, they need to scale, and they need to fit in the environments where companies already run their businesses. And they need infrastructure that customers already trust for their most important workloads. That’s what makes this partnership with AWS so important.”