OpenAI just said the quiet part out loud.
In an internal memo sent to staff on Sunday and obtained by CNBC, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser acknowledged that the company's foundational partnership with Microsoft has been constraining its ability to reach enterprise customers - and positioned Amazon as the path forward.
"Our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success. But it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are - for many that's Bedrock," Dresser wrote, referring to Amazon Web Services' platform that gives enterprise customers access to multiple AI models including OpenAI's.
The memo landed less than two months after Amazon announced plans to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a strategic partnership. Dresser described enterprise demand since that announcement as "frankly staggering."
The Relationship That Built OpenAI - and Its Limits
Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019 and played a direct role in rescuing the company during the board crisis of November 2023. The partnership gave OpenAI access to Azure compute infrastructure that made ChatGPT's scale possible. In exchange, Microsoft secured deeply preferential access to OpenAI's models, bundling them into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI services - and in the process, building a distribution layer that runs through Microsoft's sales apparatus rather than OpenAI's.
For a company now valued at over $850 billion and preparing for a potential IPO, that dependency has a cost. Many Fortune 500 companies operate primarily on AWS rather than Azure. Reaching them through Microsoft channels meant routing through a competitor's sales team. The Amazon partnership gives OpenAI a second major distribution channel - and leverage it did not have before.
The Anthropic Dimension
The memo was not just about Amazon. Dresser took direct aim at Anthropic, describing its strategy as built on "fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI." She alleged that Anthropic's reported $30 billion annual run rate is inflated by approximately $8 billion due to accounting treatment that grosses up revenue share with Amazon and Google. Anthropic disputes this characterization, saying its approach is consistent with GAAP.
The competitive intensity is worth noting. At the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco last week, the dominant conversation was described as "Claude mania" - with enterprise leaders reporting deep adoption of Anthropic's models. Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, said it had "become a religion." OpenAI currently claims enterprise makes up 40% of its revenue, on track to reach parity with consumer revenue by year end.
For enterprise technology buyers, this memo signals that the AI infrastructure market's power dynamics are shifting. OpenAI is no longer exclusively a Microsoft story. What that means for pricing, access, and long-term partnerships is a question every enterprise AI strategy team should be examining now.
