Amazon Web Services is preparing to launch a new AI agent marketplace, according to information acquired by TechCrunch. Anthropic is expected to be one of its partners in the endeavor.
The marketplace is likely to open on July 15, just after its official announcement at the AWS Summit in New York City.
AWS could replicate SaaS marketplaces in its AI agent shop
According to TechCrunch, startups will be able to list their AI agents for sale and directly reach the audience of AWS customers. In turn, those customers can search for agents and download them straight from the marketplace. It’s similar to the way SaaS offerings are purchased individually rather than being bundled with companies’ broader services.
The marketplace offers startups such as Anthropic a major revenue opportunity through AWS’s vast customer base. As for Amazon, it will take a percentage of the revenue that startups receive from each agent installed.
For Anthropic, this is the continuation of an ongoing partnership; Anthropic received $4 billion from Amazon in 2024 and uses Amazon Web Services to train its models. In addition, Amazon may be gearing up to pour millions into Anthropic again.
Why focus on AI agents?
AI agents are the hot trend in software, although what they can do varies immensely between agents. Nearly half of software executives (46%) say their organizations are using agentic AI in applications and workflows, according to a survey of 550 software executives globally by the low-code development platform OutSystems.
The ideal AI agent would work like a human assistant, making appointments and performing other small and tedious, yet important, tasks. Meanwhile, the person to whom the agent belongs could get more work done or have more leisure time because the agent would take care of rote tasks. Agents can plan and act on multi-step processes.
Today, some AI agents can perform a wide range of tasks. The new Alexa, for example, can make dinner reservations. AI agents could serve as the front line of customer service interactions online. Other tools called AI agents are more specific, sitting within software platforms and performing now-common AI jobs like summarization.
Google Cloud and Microsoft both have AI agent marketplaces, while NVIDIA offers a menu of models from which agents can be built.
TechRepublic has reached out to AWS and Anthropic.
Microsoft and OpenAI are mired in renegotiations because a clause in their deal said Remond will lose access to AI models if OpenAI invents artificial general intelligence.
