OpenAI widens enterprise channels

OpenAI is widening how it sells to large customers, pushing Amazon Web Services as a key route into companies while keeping Microsoft as a core partner. (cnbc.com) In a memo reported Monday, April 13, OpenAI’s new revenue chief told employees that Microsoft had been “foundational” but had also “limited our ability” to reach some clients, especially where buyers want to purchase through their existing cloud vendor. (cnbc.com) That sales push follows a February 27 OpenAI-Amazon deal that makes Amazon Web Services the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s platform for building and managing teams of artificial intelligence agents. OpenAI and Amazon also said they are developing a Stateful Runtime Environment for Amazon Bedrock and that Amazon plans to invest $50 billion in OpenAI. (openai.com) OpenAI has already been broadening its infrastructure mix. Amazon Web Services said on November 3, 2025, that OpenAI signed a seven-year, $38 billion agreement for Amazon compute, with capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026. (aboutamazon.com) The product changes now line up with that channel shift. OpenAI’s Help Center says that, as of April 2, 2026, ChatGPT Business and ChatGPT Enterprise now offer two seat types: a standard ChatGPT seat and a Codex-only seat built around flexible pricing. (help.openai.com) Under that system, credits act like a shared usage wallet for advanced features. Business users keep per-seat limits and can draw from purchased credit packs if they go over, while Enterprise and Education workspaces buy a shared credit pool at the contract level and can set spend controls by group. (help.openai.com) OpenAI also changed how some enterprise coding access is billed. Its Enterprise documentation says Codex seats have no fixed monthly per-user price and use token-based pricing billed in credits per million tokens for new Enterprise customers, while older customers stay on a legacy message-based rate card until migration. (help.openai.com) The current rate card shows the broader move toward metered enterprise usage. OpenAI lists credit charges for features such as Deep Research at 50 credits per task, Agent at 30 credits per message, images at 5 credits per generation, and voice at 5 credits per minute. (help.openai.com) OpenAI is making these changes as enterprise demand is spreading across rivals, not just one vendor. PYMNTS, citing Bloomberg and The Information, reported on April 7 that Anthropic had reached a $30 billion annualized revenue run rate, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, with more than 1,000 enterprise clients paying over $1 million a year. (pymnts.com) The immediate test is whether more customers choose to buy OpenAI the way they already buy cloud software: through Amazon Web Services contracts, shared spending pools and usage-based line items, rather than a single partner channel. (cnbc.com)