The inertia is legal and financial. People are paying Anthropic through AWS accounts because the simple reason of not dealing making new contract and legal agreements is enough of reason of the inertia.
But, eventually, I’m quite sure that AWS will also provide open models with those contracts without any inertia. Copilot is already offering Kimi.
My company has a deal with Devin and they provide new models all the time, and open models are becoming the most used ones by our internal metrics, especially because the company is very worried about cost.
AWS already supports Llama and GLM in its Bedrock service for hosted models.
They’re much cheaper to run, eg, Llama 3.3 Instruct 70B is 5-10x cheaper than Sonnet 5.
https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/
Say you have 20% of usecases that require the more expensive model — but in 80% you could just use Llama instead of Sonnet (eg, for basic queries of a document). That saves 80% of that 80%, or 65% of your total bill!
That is the kind of “swap” that’s likely to occur in automated tooling as pricing pressure kicks in — “can you save 65% on our AI bill by switching Bedrock over in 80% of uses?”
Also they pay for legal liability of code produced