OpenAI got out of Azure this Monday. Anthropic locked deeper into AWS the same week. Two opposite plays in one week.
April 27. Microsoft and OpenAI rewrote their deal:
- License to OpenAI IP runs through 2032. Not exclusive anymore.
- OpenAI can sell on AWS and Google Cloud. Anywhere.
- Microsoft stops paying revenue share to OpenAI. OpenAI keeps paying Microsoft, capped, through 2030.
- The AGI clause is dead. Microsoft no longer gets a contractual veto if OpenAI declares AGI.
Same week, Anthropic doubled its AWS commitment. $100 billion-plus over a decade. Trainium. Graviton. Co-engineered with Annapurna at the silicon level.
OpenAI is going multi-cloud. Anthropic is going AWS-only.
We tried cloud-agnostic serverless on a backend project. The abstraction cost more than the lock-in. The maintenance ahead looked... scary. We went AWS-only. Same trade-off just hit the model layer.
Azure OpenAI customers: the exclusivity is gone. Bedrock + Claude customers: Anthropic just signed a 10-year AWS lease on your behalf.
Pick a model, you've picked a cloud strategy. The model vendors are picking too.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/04/27/the-next-phase-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/ https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-amazon-compute