AWS to Launch AI Agent Marketplace with Anthropic as Partner, Eyes Major Push into Next Wave of Enterprise AI

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is preparing to roll out a dedicated AI agent marketplace next week, with support from key partner Anthropic, in a move that could reshape how businesses deploy artificial intelligence across enterprise software environments.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, who spoke to TechCrunch, the launch is scheduled to take place at the AWS Summit in New York City on July 15, TechCrunch has reported exclusively.

While AWS and Anthropic declined to comment, the initiative marks Amazon’s most direct push into a competitive and fast-growing corner of the AI market—autonomous agents that operate independently to perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with software systems using AI models at their core.

The marketplace will provide AWS customers with a centralized platform to discover, install, and pay for AI agents designed by third-party startups. Those startups will, in turn, gain a direct distribution channel to AWS’s massive enterprise base, a move that could dramatically boost reach and recurring revenue.

What Are AI Agents—and Why Is Everyone Betting on Them?

Though the term remains loosely defined, AI agents are typically autonomous software programs powered by AI models capable of interacting with websites, apps, and other digital systems to execute tasks without direct human input. This includes actions like making bookings, sorting emails, pulling records from CRMs, or even coordinating workflows across tools like Slack or Salesforce.

AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have embraced the concept of agents as the next frontier of generative AI. So has Silicon Valley’s venture capital engine, with investor enthusiasm reaching levels not seen since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. The challenge, however, has been fragmentation: each company typically offers agents within isolated ecosystems, making them difficult to integrate into broader enterprise architectures.

With its marketplace, AWS hopes to solve that, offering a central hub for AI agent discovery and deployment, potentially leapfrogging rivals in distribution efficiency.

Anthropic’s Critical Role

Anthropic, the OpenAI rival behind the Claude family of models, is not just a marketplace participant—it’s also backed by Amazon, which has committed up to $4 billion in investment to the startup. In May, Anthropic crossed $3 billion in annualized revenue, fueled by enterprise demand for its Claude-powered API and growing adoption of its multi-modal agents.

Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic has structured its business around enabling agent creation at scale via its API. This makes it particularly well-positioned to thrive in an ecosystem where developers and enterprises browse, pay for, and install pre-built or customizable agents as easily as they would install software plugins.

The new AWS marketplace could dramatically expand Anthropic’s reach, especially among businesses already running infrastructure on Amazon’s cloud or looking to integrate agents into existing AWS workflows. That includes rivals’ customers who may be looking to diversify their AI vendor base.

How It Will Work

Sources say the AWS agent marketplace will mirror the structure of SaaS marketplaces. Developers and startups can list agents with tiered pricing models, and AWS will take a small revenue cut. This monetization model is expected to be more flexible than bundled services and could offer recurring subscription pricing or usage-based charges.

For enterprise customers, the marketplace will be a one-stop location to search, evaluate, and deploy AI agents based on business needs. Agents may be optimized for customer service automation, finance, logistics, or DevOps, depending on the developer’s focus.

While Amazon is not the first to introduce an AI agent marketplace—Google Cloud, Microsoft, Salesforce, and ServiceNow have already launched similar platforms—AWS enters the space with a larger cloud footprint and stronger enterprise AI demand, giving it a significant distribution edge.

AWS’s push into AI agents comes at a time when control over enterprise AI deployment is emerging as the next major battleground in the tech industry. Google’s AI Agent Marketplace, launched in April, offers developers tools to sell agents directly into Google Cloud environments. Microsoft’s Agent Store, introduced in May as part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, targets office productivity users with customizable task agents. Salesforce and ServiceNow have also baked agent marketplaces into their own SaaS offerings.

But AWS, which serves as the backend for a vast number of AI startups, could use its new marketplace to create a network effect. By giving developers access to its user base—and potentially bundling agent functionality into AWS-native services—it could become the go-to marketplace for buyers and sellers alike.

Crucially, the marketplace opens another monetization front for Amazon’s cloud business, which is under pressure from Google and Microsoft in the race to define AI’s next chapter. It also offers AWS a way to expand its ecosystem around developer tools, data services, and AI infrastructure, creating lock-in that goes beyond compute or storage.

With the AWS Summit New York just days away, all eyes will be on how Amazon frames the announcement—and how startups like Anthropic position themselves within the new ecosystem. If successful, the marketplace could become a central pillar of how businesses adopt and scale AI agents across industries.

The launch also signals a maturing of the agent space. What began as experimental chatbots is now evolving into a structured marketplace for autonomous enterprise software, with Amazon betting that AI agents will be as essential to cloud computing as apps were to mobile.