Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to unveil a new AI agent marketplace on 15 July during its New York Summit, aiming to boost how autonomous digital agents are accessed and monetised.
One of its strategic partners is Anthropic, the startup now sitting on a $13.8 billion investment from Amazon.
TechCrunch confirmed through two sources directly familiar with the development that this is a calculated strike at a fragmented and increasingly competitive sector.
AWS’ offering will give startups a central hub to publish their AI agents while giving enterprise users a one-stop shop to search, test, and deploy the tools they need.
This marketplace will offer plug-and-play integration, allowing customers to deploy agents directly within AWS environments. Startups, in turn, will be able to charge fees based on usage or subscriptions, an approach similar to how Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models operate.
AWS will take a revenue cut, but insiders say it’s deliberately minimal to entice developers.
Notably, Google Cloud launched its Agent Marketplace back in April. Microsoft followed suit in May with its Agent Store inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. Salesforce and ServiceNow also offer similar platforms for enterprise workflows. Amazon’s late entry may raise eyebrows, but its execution appears bigger in scope and more commercially aggressive.
What gives AWS a potential edge is infrastructure. With its own cloud powering the backend, AWS can offer developers access to hundreds of thousands of GPUs for building, training, and running agents, something most competitors simply can’t match.
Anthropic’s involvement, meanwhile, may prove critical. The company’s Claude model, already considered one of the few credible rivals to OpenAI’s GPT-40, will form the backbone of many of its own agentic offerings.
Anthropic also enables third-party developers to build agents using its API, and with its revenue reportedly hitting $3 billion annually as of May 2025, its model appears to be resonating with the enterprise crowd.
“The marketplace could help us reach a broader set of users, especially those who are already operating in AWS environments or looking for interoperability,” one Anthropic insider said, requesting anonymity due to lack of public authorisation.
Essentially, this launch also aims to solve what’s fast becoming one of the most annoying problems in the AI space: fragmentation. Today, most AI agents live inside walled gardens.
A customer who uses agents built on one cloud can’t easily deploy or integrate them into another system. By unifying offerings under one marketplace, AWS hopes to simplify that chaos, and grab a major piece of what analysts expect to become a $50.3 billion market by 2030.
Even with this, everyone is wondering if these marketplaces actually bring value to smaller startups or get swallowed by dominant players. That outcome may depend less on marketplace design and more on execution, and whether AWS can place itself not just as a provider, but as the centre of gravity in the emerging agent economy.
In the meantime, AWS is betting heavily that developers want more than just raw compute, they want access, scale, and visibility. With Anthropic on board and infrastructure already in place, Amazon may be late to the party, but it didn’t come unarmed.
