OpenAI touts Amazon alliance in memo, says Microsoft has 'limited our ability' to reach clients

OpenAI's newly appointed revenue chief, Denise Dresser, sent a memo to staffers on Sunday, touting the company's alliance with Amazon as a key growth driver for its enterprise business, while noting the constraints of its longstanding tie-up with Microsoft.

Dresser's memo lands less than two months after Amazon announced plans to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a strategic partnership. Microsoft, Amazon's top cloud computing rival, has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, backing the company long before it kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT.

Amazon Web Services, the leader in cloud infrastructure, gives companies access to all of the major AI models, including those from OpenAI, through a platform called Bedrock.

"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 in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. "Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering."

Microsoft did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

OpenAI is desperate to win market share in the enterprise, where rival Anthropic's Claude model has established itself as the market leader, while Google Gemini is also competing aggressively. Claude's momentum was the hottest topic at AI industry conference HumanX in San Francisco last week, with Arvind Jain, CEO of enterprise AI startup Glean, describing it as "Claude mania."

"It has become a religion, that's the level of that mania," Jain said in an interview at the event.

OpenAI and Anthropic are both trying to convince investors of their strengthening positions as they gear up for IPOs as soon as this year. The enterprise is critical for them as companies are pouring money into AI, a trend that's slashed the value of public software companies, which are increasingly seen as vulnerable. OpenAI, meanwhile, was valued at over $850 billion in its latest fundraising round in late March, a month after investors valued Anthropic at $380 billion.

Dresser told CNBC earlier this month that OpenAI's enterprise business makes up 40% of the company's revenue, and it's "on track to reach parity" with its consumer business by the end of the year.

In the Sunday memo, Dresser said the market can be "noisy, volatile and distracting at times," and she encouraged employees to focus on spending time with customers. She added that Anthropic's strategy is built on "fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI," while OpenAI's "positive message" will win over time.

Dresser said Anthropic has also made a "strategic misstep to not acquire enough compute," echoing comments OpenAI made in a separate memo to investors on Thursday. The company said Anthropic is "operating on a meaningfully smaller curve," and that its own ramp is "materially ahead and widening." Anthropic announced a deal with Google and Broadcom for "multiple gigawatts" of compute earlier this month.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

For OpenAI, the relationship with Microsoft is one that both companies continue to describe as core and strategic, but it's shown signs of strain as the partners move onto the other's turf. In mid-2024, Microsoft added OpenAI to the list of competitors in its annual report, a roster that for years has included megacap peers Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

OpenAI has increasingly turned to other cloud providers, like CoreWeave, Google and Oracle, for capacity, and last year Microsoft started publicly testing a homegrown AI model that could lead to enhancements to its Copilot assistant for consumers. 

OpenAI hired Dresser, the former CEO of Slack and a longtime Salesforce executive, as chief revenue officer in December. She recently expanded her role to include Brad Lightcap's commercial responsibilities as he transitioned from operating chief to a new position focused on "special projects."

Dresser wrote that the company needs to "stay focused, work as one team and operate at the highest level of excellence and row in the same direction."

"The market is ours to win, let's execute accordingly," she wrote.

—CNBC's Kate Rooney contributed to this report.

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