The three storefronts through which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft resell other companies' AI models like Claude. We explain what they actually do, and why three cloud giants are fighting to be the door, not the maker.
Here's what happens in practice. A bank wants a chatbot that answers customers using Claude, the model made by Anthropic. Instead of signing a separate contract with Anthropic, the bank opens Amazon Bedrock, because it already keeps its databases and security systems there. It clicks Claude in the list of models, pays through the account it already has with Amazon - and the model starts running inside its own infrastructure, without its data traveling out to a third company.
The idea is simple, and it's business - not charity. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft run enormous cloud infrastructures, the servers where websites, databases, and entire companies live. Building an AI model at Claude's level is expensive and slow, so all three invited the best outside models onto their storefront and take a cut of every sale. Google does it with its own model, Gemini, too, but sells Claude alongside it - profiting from both sides of the counter.
It's used by companies that already live inside one of the three clouds and don't want a second door out. If your whole system is on Amazon, you go through Bedrock. If it's on Google Cloud - Google's service for storing and processing data - you open Vertex. If your company runs on Microsoft and Office, you use Foundry, which until recently was called Azure AI Studio. The gain is that security, access, and billing all stay inside a familiar system - trust doesn't get spread out to a third party.
The differences between the three aren't in the models themselves - Claude on Bedrock is the same Claude Anthropic offers directly. The difference is in the packaging: who controls access, where the data sits, which other cloud tools it automatically pairs with.
I look at how it's put together
The three cloud giants aren't competing over who builds the better model - they leave that to Anthropic, to OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT), and to Google DeepMind (Google's AI lab). Here they're competing over who gets to be the storefront the money passes through. So when you see news that Claude 'is coming to Azure' or 'is now on Google Cloud', don't read it as AI news. Read it as distribution news - who controls the door companies walk through to reach the most in-demand model right now.