Claude got a looooot more buy in with a lot of privacy-concerned orgs I work with because they could access it through their "trusted" intermediate Amazon. OpenAI has been banned and is not trusted. I'm not sure that I agree with these orgs' legal teams' assessments, but they definitely read the terms of service far closer than I did.
We will see if this changes the equation, but it feels like OpenAI is pretty far behind and playing catch up on all fronts. Though to be honest, "pretty far behind" is like 2-8 weeks in the AI world, so it may not matter a ton, it's mostly perception. And for me and my information bubble, perception of OpenAI is rock-bottom due to Sam Altman. From appearing unethical to appearing unhinged with demands from fabs and everything else, I'm not a fan.
While Anthopic has the best model and a focussed (no disturbance, lawsuits) leadership, they got a lot of enterprise access due to AWS. It is mutual no doubt, with both sides benefitting. The culture of feedback loop of AWS customers would have helped them in getting to enterprise-ready faster. Just my hypothesis.
Legally, SLA, and data concern-wise, is this any better than OpenAI on Azure? That has been around for a while.
They're also not focused exclusively only on building an LLM, they have video and image generation too. Anthropic has one single focus, and this is why they are usually at the very top in the SWE benchmarks.
It just not about AWS being some "trusted intermediary"... it's that the model runs inside the customer own AWS account under a different contract. AWS explicitly states inputs/outputs are not shared with model providers and are not used to train base models [1]
And for OpenAI, there is a May 2025 preservation order in NYT v. OpenAI. The court is forcing OpenAI to retain ChatGPT output logs indefinitely, including chats users have deleted that would normally be purged within 30 days [2]. That makes it a non starter for HIPAA/GDPR bound orgs.
The thing they are really wildly behind on is a business model. They are losing wild amounts of money per customer and it is hard to see how the competitive situation is going to allow them to fix that.
You can sign ZDR agreements with any of the major LLM providers. Using AWS alone is also not sufficient. Even though AWS is running the model, you need to contact them for proper ZDR.[0]
[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/claude...