OpenAI Brings GPT-5.5 to AWS Bedrock as Microsoft Exclusivity Ends

OpenAI on April 28, 2026 made its frontier GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4 models, plus its Codex coding harness and a new Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents service, available on AWS Bedrock in limited preview, according to OpenAI’s and AWS’s joint announcements and CNBC’s coverage. The launch is the first time OpenAI’s frontier models have been served from any cloud other than Microsoft Azure, and it lands one day after Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership to end seven years of cloud exclusivity. AWS-hosted OpenAI inference inherits IAM, PrivateLink, guardrails, KMS encryption and CloudTrail logging by default, and consumed tokens count toward existing AWS Enterprise Discount Programs.

The restructured Microsoft–OpenAI deal, jointly announced on April 27, 2026, replaces exclusivity with a non-exclusive license that runs through 2032, removes the previously contentious AGI clauses, and caps revenue-sharing payments from OpenAI to Microsoft through 2030, per Microsoft’s blog post and reporting from The Register. Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI, and OpenAI is now free to sell its models on rival clouds. The change formally cleans up the legal mismatch with OpenAI’s February 2026 deal with Amazon, under which AWS agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI and the lab expanded its existing AWS commitment by $100 billion over eight years.

For enterprise buyers, the practical effect is immediate: organizations that have standardized on AWS can now consume GPT-5.5 inside their existing security perimeter, and OpenAI’s Codex — the same harness that powers Codex CLI — can be wired up to Bedrock. The Bedrock Managed Agents offering is the more strategic piece, giving enterprises a way to deploy long-running OpenAI agents that maintain context, call tools and take action across business systems without rebuilding orchestration in-house. Pricing on Bedrock is documented as potentially differing from OpenAI’s direct API rates, and the preview is gated to selected enterprise customers in the initial rollout.