Amazon Web Services said concerns about conflicts of interest are not an issue after it made large investments in both OpenAI and Anthropic.

TechCrunch reported on April 8 that AWS CEO Matt Garman (맷 가먼) said at the HumanX conference in San Francisco that there was no problem with a potential clash between a $50 billion investment in OpenAI and its long-term cooperation with Anthropic, which includes an $8 billion investment. He called it “the way AWS has done business for a long time.”

Garman said AWS has maintained a structure of working with partners while also competing with them from the beginning. He said AWS has partnered with external companies because it could not develop every service itself given the nature of the cloud business, and competition has naturally arisen due to the structure of the technology industry.

“Technology is tightly connected, so it is unavoidable that you have to compete with partners,” he said, adding that AWS has built its ability to respond to the market in that environment. He also said that even if AWS services compete with partner products, it has kept to a principle of “not giving ourselves an unfair advantage.”

The remarks are interpreted as an official defence of AWS’s strategy of working at the same time with multiple major model companies in the generative AI market. OpenAI and Anthropic are leading AI model developers that compete directly in the market, but AWS is choosing to offer both companies’ models on its cloud.

The background to the strategy is competition in the cloud market. With both companies’ models already available on Microsoft’s cloud, the analysis says it was close to essential for AWS to secure access to OpenAI models as well.

Garman said the structure of AI services is likely to shift from a single-model focus to a “multi-model” system. He said cloud providers are strengthening “model routing” functions that automatically connect different models depending on the type of task, and that combining models optimised for planning, reasoning and code generation is likely to spread.

This trend is expected to further increase the influence of cloud companies. Customers can choose among various models within a platform rather than being tied to a single model, and cloud providers can secure the initiative by placing external and in-house models together.

Exclusive relationships with specific AI companies are also weakening in the investment market. OpenAI investors participated in Anthropic’s recent large investment round, and Microsoft also joined, the report said.

Ultimately, AWS’s strategy shows that cloud providers in the AI era are expanding beyond simple infrastructure providers into intermediaries that distribute various competing models on a single platform. As a result, the market’s key issue is expected to focus less on exclusive ties to a specific model and more on how cloud providers manage conflicts of interest between multiple AI partners and their own services.