Amazon-Anthropic Plan to Adopt Token-Based Pricing Draws Attention

AI startup Anthropic and Amazon maintain a partnership covering AI models and cloud computing, with related fees previously calculated mainly according to hours of computing capacity used. Because large language model inference costs directly affect the scale of enterprise adoption, the change in their pricing metric has also become an important indicator of the generative AI business model’s evolution.

Amazon and Anthropic are expected to shift their partnership’s payment model in 2027 from computing hours to the number of tokens processed by the models. Outside observers have raised concerns that the new system could increase Amazon’s model usage costs, but Amazon has publicly denied this. The companies have not disclosed the contract value, price per token or annual token volume.