Bedrock 관리 에이전트에 대한 OpenAI 및 AWS CEO와의 인터뷰

Good morning, As I noted yesterday, today’s Stratechery Interview is early in terms of my timing — Tuesday instead of Thursday — and late in terms of delivery — 1pm Eastern instead of 6am — because the topic was embargoed. That embargo created a bit of a weird situation for me over the last several days: - Last Friday I conducted the following interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman about Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI; naturally, one of my questions was about how this fit in with OpenAI’s deal with Microsoft giving Azure exclusive access to OpenAI models. - Late Sunday I heard through the grapevine that Microsoft would announce something Monday morning; I wondered if it might be a preemptive lawsuit! - On Monday Microsoft and OpenAI announced they had amended their agreement, allowing OpenAI to serve its products on other cloud providers, including AWS. So here we are. I think the Microsoft-OpenAI deal makes a lot of sense for both sides. Here are the bullet points of the new arrangement from Microsoft’s post: - Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider. - Microsoft will continue to have a license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032. Microsoft’s license will now be non-exclusive. - Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI. - Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress, at the same percentage but subject to a total cap. - Microsoft continues to participate directly in OpenAI’s growth as a major shareholder. I think the most important point is the last one. Azure had a real competitive advantage thanks to being the only hyperscaler able to offer OpenAI models, but this also hindered OpenAI, particularly once it became clear that many enterprises cared first and foremost about accessing models on their current cloud of choice; I’ve been noting for a while that this was a real competitive advantage for Anthropic. In other words, Azure’s exclusivity was actively damaging Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, and given Anthropic’s rapid growth this year, Microsoft needed to tend to their investment, even if it diminished Azure’s differentiation. OpenAI, meanwhile, clearly sees AWS as a massive opportunity — so much so that they are forgoing Azure-related revenue for the next few years (which, per the previous point, will help Azure management feel better about losing their exclusivity; their PnL is going to look a lot better without paying a revenue share to OpenAI). OpenAI is also releasing Microsoft from the AGI clause; now the agreement between the two companies will run through 2032 no matter what. What does seem clear is that OpenAI’s focus is going to be on AWS, and the greatest evidence in that regard is the topic of this interview: Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI. The easiest way to think about this offering is Codex in AWS; a lot of what makes Codex work is the fact that it is local, which gives you a lot of complexity, particularly in terms of security, for free. It’s another thing entirely to figure out how to make agents work across an organization, and the goal of this offering is to make these workflows much more accessible for organizations who already have most of their data in AWS. To that end, in this interview, we discuss how AWS created the entire cloud category, and the impact it had on startups, and how AI is both similar and different to that previous paradigm shift. Then we discuss Bedrock Managed Agents, what it is, and how it differs from Amazon’s existing AgentCore offering. We also touch on Trainium and why chips won’t matter to most AI users, and why partnering makes sense relative to Google’s focus on full integration. As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player. On to the Interview: An Interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman About Bedrock Managed Agents This interview is lightly edited for clarity. Topics: AWS and Startups | Bedrock Managed Agents | Local vs. Cloud | AgentCore vs. Managed Agents | Trainium | Customer Demand | Building the AI StackAWS and Startups Matt Garman and Sam Altman — well Matt, welcome to Stratechery — and Sam, welcome back [I previously interviewed Altman in October 2025, March 2025, and February 2023]. Sam Altman: Thank you. Matt Garman: Thank you, thanks for having me. So Matt, this is your first time on Stratechery. Alas, I think that Sam’s presence is going to preclude the usual getting to know you section. Besides, he doesn’t want to hear us reminisce about our times at Kellogg Business School, but it is good to have a fellow alumnus on the podcast. MG: Yeah, I’m happy to be here. I’ll come back another time and we can do a little deeper dive. That’d be great. You’ve been working on AWS since you were an intern, and you’re now in charge of the entire organization during this AI wave. What aspects of building the AI business are the same as building the original commodity compute business, for lack of a better term, and what aspects are really different? MG: I think that the parts that are the same are that I see that same excitement and builders out there being able to do things that they were never able to do before, and one of the cool things is when we first started AWS, is developers all of a sudden could get their hands on infrastructure that was only available to the largest companies who had millions of dollars to go build data centers. With a credit card and a couple of dollars, they could spin up applications and it really exploded what was possible for people building out there on the Internet. We kind of took the idea that people could build whatever they want and we weren’t going to presuppose what they should do and that the creativity of the world out there was, if we could put powerful tools in front of them, they’d build interesting and amazing things. I think this is as much, if not more, transformational to what it’s enabling builders out there to do. As you think about what’s possible, you don’t have to have gone to school and learned for 10 years to code in order to go build an application, you don’t have to have huge teams of hundreds of people and months and months and months of time to go build things. You can build things with small teams, you can build it fast and you can iterate quickly, and AI is unlocking all sorts of innovation across every different aspect of the world. I think in many ways that’s very similar, and it’s super exciting to see what it’s enabling from the customer base out there. There was a bit, though, when AWS came along, you were the only one, so you get all the upsides and downsides and everything sort of for free. Is there a bit where it felt like in the AWS era, there’s a lot about commodity compute, making it fungible, elastic, cheap — in AI, particularly in training, it feels like the winning abstraction was more about these really vertically integrated super clusters, really advanced networking, and really tight linkages between software and hardware. Was that sort of a surprise for you, where you’re coming at it now — instead of fresh, “We’re the only ones here, we had a particular way of looking at large-scale compute”, and at least for the first few years of AI, it maybe didn’t perfectly align? MG: I don’t know that it was different for us. I think for what was different though, is just the incredible rapid scale of adoption, and I think that that’s probably surprised everybody. Sam, you can weigh in different if you disagree, but just the speed of adoption and how fast people have grabbed onto the capabilities there, I think has surprised everyone. It’s different if you go to the, when we started cloud computing, it took us a really long time to explain why a bookseller would provide your compute power, that was a lot of explanation to explain what cloud computing was. There was a lot of hard work that people forget, but back in 2006, it wasn’t a given that that’s just how the world’s computing would move to and so there was a lot of kind of hard work there. Do you think you had to do a bit of explaining now though, because lots of people were anchoring on the training era and you’re like, “We’re thinking about the inference era“, and that’s going to be something different, maybe you still had to get those explanatory powers going again? MG: You do, but it’s just how quickly people understand what you’re talking about is just totally different. So I think yes, I think if you move from where people are saying, “That does seem kind of cool, and it’s really neat that I have this intelligent chatbot that I can talk to”, going to, “I can actually do work in your enterprise”, has been a little bit of an education, but it’s also been relatively quick in the scope of how fast technology moves. We’re going to get to the product that we’re here for very quickly, I promise, but Sam — from the startup ecosystem perspective, when you look back, obviously AWS, transformational, completely changed where the barrier was, now anyone can get started. You have seeds, you have angel investors, and it sort of moves back the barrier where the cutoff point, you don’t have to get servers on a PowerPoint, you can build an app and then go to your Series A or whatever it might be. What, though, is different or the same compared to what that enabled versus the world today from your perspective? SA: I think there have been four great moments for platform enablement of startups at mass scale: there was the Internet, there was cloud, there was mobile, and then there was AI. The first one of those that I was kind of like an adult for was the cloud and in the early days of YC [Combinator] — it’s like hard to overstate what a change this meant for startups. Before, you had these startups that were like renting colo[cation] space and putting together servers and putting stuff in there and it was this like massively complex thing, and you had to like raise all this money. Then all of a sudden, even though the cloud happened like right after YC got started, I guess it was the year after. I was just going to ask that — is it really at the end of the day, they’re really hand-in-hand more than you realized at the time? SA: They felt incredibly hand-in-hand at the time, it felt like YC was, you know, surfing this wave of the cloud from the very beginning because there were some early pre-AWS examples. You don’t need to put that much money into a startup to get something off the ground if AWS exists compared to what it might’ve been before. SA: It was this huge enabling change and it was part of why YC sounded so crazy at the time. People were like, “Well, there’s no way you can fund a startup with a few tens of thousands of dollars, it’s impossible, the server costs more than that”, so it was this complete change to what startups could do with small amounts of capital. Startups generally win when there is a big platform shift and you can do things with a faster cycle time and much less capital than before, that’s a classic way startups can beat big companies, and at the beginning of my career, I really witnessed that happen with the cloud, it actually feels quite directionally similar now watching what companies are doing building on AI, but as Matt was saying, the speed of it is crazy. Is there a bit where the incumbents, the large companies, are adopting this way faster than they than they were the cloud? SA: There’s definitely more of that, but I also mean just the the rate that revenue is scaling in at startups — I spoke at YC recently and I kind of asked at the end, “What are the expectations for revenue for a good company at the end of YC?”, and they’re like, “Well it’s kind of changing every month, maybe we’d have a different answer at the beginning of the batch versus the end of the batch”, and this never used to happen before. Just the rate at which people are able to build scaled business on this new platform is unlike anything I’ve seen before. You were the cloud of choice for basically all startups, a huge advantage to that whole era, Matt. What makes you the cloud of choice today? Because you think about a lot of people building on the OpenAI API, or is that something you felt, “Actually we’re coming at this market from a very different perspective, we have a huge installed base who’s begging us to get AI things, and we have less visibility into this whole cohort that Sam’s talking about”? MG: I think there’s a couple of things. One is, is we’re quite excited about our partnership, and I think it’s going to be really meaningful to a bunch of startups out there. But today, even if you go and you talk to startups, the vast majority of scaling startups are still scaling on AWS today, and there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that. The scale is there, the availability is there, the security is there, the reliability is there, that kind of partner ecosystem of other ISVs are in AWS, the customers are in AWS. (laughing) Everyone’s used the AWS panel whether they wanted to or not, so they’re used to it. MG: And we help them. We spend a ton of time enabling startups, whether it’s with credits, but it’s not just with credits, it’s advice on how to set up your systems, how to think about go-to-market, a bunch of those things that are, I think, are really appreciated by a bunch of the startups, we invest a lot of time and effort to make sure because we really feel like the startups are the lifeblood of AWS. They were from the beginning, like when Sam was talking about it, but they remain today, and I still go once a quarter out to Silicon Valley or other places to meet directly with startups to hear what they’re doing, to make sure that what we’re building is landing with them. So there is more competition today than there was 20 years ago for that startup attention, and it’s just as important for us as it’s ever been and and we spend a ton of time to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of those startups. Is it fair to say people building directly on the OpenAI API, as opposed to say the Azure version of it, are more likely to have a stack of AWS for for regular compute and then OpenAI for for their AI? MG: I think that’s a very common pattern that a lot of startups have today, absolutely. Bedrock Managed Agents Well that brings us to today’s announcement: Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI, I think I got that right. The pitch, as I understand it, is not simply OpenAI models are available in AWS — I don’t think that’s allowed — it’s that OpenAI’s frontier models are being packaged inside an AWS-native agent runtime, identity, permission state