Amazon engineers are reportedly distilling Anthropic models to cut costs before new token-based pricing kicks...
Summary
Amazon engineers are already distilling Anthropic models into smaller, cheaper versions for internal use. Starting next year, Amazon will pay by tokens processed rather than compute hours, which could push costs up sharply.
Original Article
Captured source content or English translation, normalized into this reading format.
Ad
Amazon engineers are reportedly distilling Anthropic models to cut costs before new token-based pricing kicks in
Matthias Bastian[View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthias-bastian-128b71b1/ "View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian")
Jun 29, 2026
Worried about rising costs, some Amazon engineers are already distilling Anthropic models to build smaller, cheaper versions for internal use. That's according to areport from The Information. Distillation works by having a smaller model learn from a larger model's outputs. Amazon has certain rights to use Anthropic's models for this purpose, according to a person familiar with the matter, similar toApple's arrangement with Google Gemini. Amazon does offer adistillation service on its Bedrock cloud platform, but Anthropic's Claude models aren't available there; only Amazon's own Nova models and Meta's Llama models are supported.
The effort ties back to a renegotiation of the partnership, according to The Information. Starting next year, Amazon will pay for Anthropic's models based on tokens processed rather than compute hours, which could push costs up sharply. An Amazon spokesperson pushed back, saying the changes from the expanded partnership won't raise costs. Anthropic points to lower prices relative to the performance its models deliver.
Amazon is reportedly exploring alternatives like OpenAI andits own Nova models. The company has invested up to$25 billion more in Anthropicandup to $50 billion in OpenAIthis year.
Ad
Ad
AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans
Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.
Source:The Information
Ask about this article…Search
BETA-TEST
×
Start new search
×\|
Send
wpDiscuz
Insert
BETA-TEST
×
Start new search
×\|
Send
wpDiscuz
Insert
Region
Europe
Heat Score
76
Category
Companies
Language
en