Report: Amazon Says AI Rate Limits Are For ‘Fair Access,’ Not Capacity Constraints

AWS is reportedly facing criticism over the limits it places on customers’ use of Anthropic’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The limits are “arbitrary” and suggest the AWS doesn’t have enough server capacity or is reserving some of it for large customers, The Information said Monday (April 21) in a report that cited four AWS customers and two consulting firms who customers use AWS.

Some customers using AWS’ Bedrock application programming interface (API) service have seen error messages with growing frequency over the past year and a half, according to the report. The report also quoted an AWS enterprise customer that said it hasn’t experienced any constraints.

AWS Senior PR Manager, Emerging Tech Kate Vorys told The Information that the company has tens of thousands of customers using Anthropic models through Bedrock and that the rate limits in Bedrock ensure customers can get “fair access” to AI models.

“The Information’s suggestion that rate limits are a response to capacity constraints, or that Amazon Bedrock is not equipped to support customers’ needs, is false,” Vorys said, per the report.

AWS launched Bedrock in April 2023, saying the service gives customers access to foundation models developed by AWS and other companies so they can choose the model that it best suited to their needs and use it to build their own generative AI application.

In September 2023, Amazon said it planned to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic as part of a larger collaboration between the two companies. The partnership would see Anthropic use chips from AWS, make AWS its primary cloud provider for “mission-critical workloads” and offer AWS customers access to its future generations of its foundation models.

In November, Amazon and Anthropic announced an expanded partnership that included Amazon investing another $4 billion in the AI company — bringing its total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion — and Anthropic making AWS its primary training partner.

In February, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy described AI as “the biggest opportunity since cloud and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the internet,” adding that the company was doubling down on AI investments with a $26 billion capital expenditure for Q4 2024 dedicated to developing AI capabilities for AWS and an expectation to keep that level of spending consistent throughout 2025.