OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS
133 points - yesterday at 9:50 PM
Sourcekylemaxwell
today at 1:00 AM
Every time somebody questions why you might "trust" AWS (or Azure or GCP or whatever), or why you'd pay this premium, I realize they are not accustomed to working in enterprise environments.
In my case, I work at a large enterprise with strict data governance built into customer contracts, and (partly related, partly not) our own governance concerns. Using vendors where you not only have infosec permission, but they are also listed as data processors in our contracts with our customers is the way not to get fired and sued.
If I'm playing around at home, with my own code and data, I can do whatever I want. But with my employer and customer? Absolutely not. It's the same reason we don't use whatever is the flavor of the month frontier model is.
Side hustles and startups just have an entirely different set of constraints and considerations.
I have just moved from a free environment in which I was able to use any AI harnesses or models to a strict enterprise environment.
I was shocked to realize how difficult it has been to have a GitHub CoPilot license on Azure. I mean, they're both Microsoft products. But no, the IT now has to figure out how to set up a GitHub enterprise, link to Azure subscription, and all that.
If you've used AI coding models in a large corporate setting, you'll know that a lot of big corporate deployments basically require using AWS Bedrock for two simple reasons:
1. Large companies tend to already have an existing relationship with AWS, which makes things way easier to go through vs. setting up a new vendor relationship
2. Large companies tend to have strong internal requirements about making sure that internal data stays under company control. With AWS Bedrock, you can be a lot more confident that what you're feeding into the models is not going to end up in someone's training set somewhere. For where I work, this requirement is a dealbreaker for going directly through OpenAI's API instead of going through AWS Bedrock.
To go a step further, the reason it's often impossible to add a new vendor if that you've signed a bunch of contracts with your customers saying you're not going to send their data to other vendors in all sorts of various flavors.
3. from my opportunity - For many (not all) LLMs, Bedrock gives you control over which country the data stays in. You have no control over that with the Claude API, for example. We do not work in the US and have strong requirements for the data to stay in our country, which Bedrock gives us control over.
A very interesting comment.
Curious to understand how AI will continue to grow if this is the trend. Assuming most valuable data is behind such firewalls. And whatever is public has been harvested, trained on top of whatever has been acquired illegally (this is a grey area).
Will it become a closed ecosystem without outside input?!
bitmasher9
today at 1:37 AM
The pace of data creation is only increasing, and our capabilities of sharing and storing it is growing as well. Lots of this is out in the open, ready for anyone to crawl and scrape.
There probably is a point of “peak data” where the amount of new data will start decreasing, but that’s likely a 22nd or 24rd century problem.
kennethops
today at 1:24 AM
imo it will slowly turn into where people run their own AI
rho138
yesterday at 11:59 PM
How is one certain bedrock data isn’t being shuttled to external providers?
What other people are saying, but also because Amazon does not want to fuck around in this space. They don't want the legal fight or the reputational damage that would come with it.
trollbridge
today at 12:35 AM
They also don't really stand to benefit from doing so, unlike basically everyone else in this space.
They have access to a ridiculous amount of private customer data and so far have not shown any predilection to misusing that access.
To take an easy example that has actually had lawsuits I can link to, you must be unfamiliar with the lawsuits against Amazon for misusing sellers' data in order to undercut them with their own products... https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/13-bln-uk-lawsuit-acc...
There's zero reason to "trust" Amazon about anything. (And yes, I know the retail and AWS sides of the company are different, but it's still the same company. The same rot is always there, just shuffled around.)
trollbridge
today at 2:08 AM
The retail side is completely different from AWS.
bijowo1676
today at 12:49 AM
this is not related to AWS, but merely to amazon's retail business and their sellers know and sign up for the deal when they sell via amazon.
every single retail company does this, they allow suppliers to sell the product using retails's infrastructure, and then retailer turns around and create private label products using sales data (Costco's Kirkland Signature, Walmart's Great Value, are just some examples)
fragmede
today at 12:54 AM
Yes, but Kirkland's signature comes from the same factory. If I'm the factory owner and Costco vis going to guarantee me sales albeit at a slightly lower margin, so long as I slap a different sticker on it, that's different than from Amazon finding out which of my products sells best and then gets someone else to rip it off so I don't get paid anything.
bijowo1676
today at 1:10 AM
First of all, we don't know which factory kirkland's products are coming from. Even if they are coming from the same factory, who guarantees the same ingredients and quality control was used???
everything from amazon is coming from China, I dont understand why does a random person who resells stuff from Chinese factories via Amazon FBA feels entitled for exclusivity arrangement with Amazon?
Was such exclusivity encoded in some form of legally enforceable agreement ?
In contrast to Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, AWS has never done anything close to sneaking in unwanted training opt-outs after the fact.
They are the only ones I trust not to do that so far. And their terms are extremely clear on that, no fuzzy language. Exactly what we want to see. So we use Bedrock.
650REDHAIR
today at 12:26 AM
Bezos and Altman pinky-promised and are super trustworthy.
azinman2
today at 12:51 AM
Seems like trusting AWS with your data has been a good bet for a long time. They wouldn’t have the size/scale otherwise.
Bezos is not in AI gold rush. AWS is shovel rental.
Also unlike Altman they are trustworthy - a lot of Amazon competitors do run on AWS for decades.
Having worked with lots of companies, I can say that trust is there. But true test is competitors of Amazon. Does Walmart use them? Ebay? Although not in exact same business.
cortesoft
today at 12:02 AM
Contracts and the force of law?
ai_fry_ur_brain
today at 12:08 AM
Which notoriously are always holding the largest corporations accountable /s
Laws and rules don’t hold anyone accountable. Anyone can say anything and then break that trust the next second.
Instead you trust your best friend because you have known them for 15 years and seen them in enough situations. It’s long term observation and predictability they ultimately gives trust.
AWS has been around 20 years and has never once shown a sign that that they would sell customer data. Could they still try? Sure, in the same way they my friend who hates seafood his entire life could suddenly flip 180 and love it. Yeah I guess it’s possible.
Any sufficiently large company will be prepared to fight this out in court where Amazon would eventually lose.
SOLAR_FIELDS
today at 12:25 AM
Actually yes, when it’s other huge corporations holding them accountable. It’s only when politicians who are much more cheaply bought get involved that creates problems. When the other side has a significant war chest to combat you with, suddenly behavior improves
avianlyric
today at 12:06 AM
Contractual obligation, external third party audits, and above all, AWS’s reputation.
AWS isn’t going to risk their reputation, and thus huge chunks of their business, just so a few AI labs can get some extra training data. That’s an insane risk with zero upside for AWS. AWS knows full well they will make insane quantities of cash without breaking legal contracts with companies who pay them billions each year for infra.
33MHz-i486
today at 1:10 AM
they’re crap on a lot dimensions of how they treat customers but data privacy/security is one thats taken pretty seriously at AWS, perhaps owing to the massive reputational damage that would result if they played loose with it.
Aurornis
yesterday at 11:52 PM
If you are wondering why anyone would spend more money to use these APIs through AWS instead of going direct: In some companies it’s nearly impossible to get new vendors approved. If the company has an AWS contract then you have to use what AWS offers.
morpheuskafka
today at 1:12 AM
Every CEO, board, and middle manager in the world is AI buzzword-obsessed now. Surely asking to sign a contract with the frontier labs directly would not get held up?
stronglikedan
today at 1:53 AM
Every CEO, board, and middle manager in the world still has to go through infosec in large orgs.
Even if you can get it approved you are adding surface area to your annual security audits, adding another vendor that needs to be disclosed on security assessments, spreading your data to yet another processor, and adding another invoice and budget discussion. Depending on your customer contracts you may need to notify them of a new vendor. This might trigger a new security review. Oh it’s just another model on Bedrock? Bliss.
iandanforth
today at 12:57 AM
This is a great move for OpenAI and one that should worry Anthropic. Bedrock was the only way I could use foundation models for a while given AWS lock-in and security requirements.
phillipcarter
today at 12:02 AM
Absolutely huge news for OpenAI. Unimaginable amount of enterprises picked up Claude just because it was available in AWS, and now there's serious competition.
2001zhaozhao
today at 12:39 AM
Good news for competition.
Claude Code keeps omitting new features from people using it through Amazon Bedrock (e.g. auto mode, ultra plan, Claude for Chrome). Hopefully some more competition can get them to rethink their strategy.
AgentOrange1234
today at 12:36 AM
This is great news. I wish they were keeping their other models updated. With Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.7 already available on OpenRouter, bedrock is just not keeping up at all.
_pdp_
yesterday at 11:51 PM
As usual the more options the better for everyone. While this is not a direct replacement it is good that it exists.
Automator666
today at 12:39 AM
[flagged]
Handy-Man
yesterday at 11:23 PM
More expensive than directly sourcing from OpenAI
easton
yesterday at 11:54 PM
The AWS pricing page says 10% more than OpenAI, which is probably because they’re forcing all inference through the US and data residency is at a 10% premium from the model vendors for whatever reason (because you’ll pay for it).
If they put in a global endpoint like with Claude (or OpenAI directly) then it’ll probably match the direct pricing, if the pattern holds.
(https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/, scroll to OpenAI)
It’s even more expensive for GovCloud customers. We pay a 30% premium on top of that.
sokoloff
yesterday at 11:59 PM
It also could be to provide room for enterprise discount pricing without it being money-losing for one of the companies.
I have worked at places that have negotiated flat percentage discounts on all AWS spend.
This explanation seems plausible to me.
BoredPositron
yesterday at 11:37 PM
It's for people that can easily pump their AWS bill but not a new vendor.
chews
yesterday at 11:34 PM
It's like OpenAI can't help themselves from failing hard.
How is this your reaction to the story?
hmartin
yesterday at 11:46 PM
Wish I could fail hard enough to have a (nearly) $1T startup with some of both the smartest models and smartest people.
dzbarsky
yesterday at 11:51 PM
Care to elaborate how OpenAI is failing in your opinion?