Amazon poured over $13 billion into Anthropic to secure a privileged seat at the AI table. Now it’s quietly shopping for other chairs.
The tech giant is evaluating alternative AI models after transitioning its Anthropic Claude integration on AWS to token-based billing in June 2026. The pricing shift has illuminated just how expensive frontier AI models are at enterprise scale, and Amazon appears to be hedging accordingly.
The pricing problem nobody saw coming
Claude models on AWS now bill through per-million-token rates or through Claude Consumption Units, priced at $0.01 each. Reports indicate some enterprise costs have climbed past $500 million monthly across the industry as token-based billing becomes the norm. That kind of number tends to get CFOs asking uncomfortable questions about return on investment.
The shift isn’t unique to Amazon and Anthropic. OpenAI and other competitors have also embraced token-based pricing structures.
