Anthropic, an artificial intelligence business started by former OpenAI research officials, will get an extra $4 billion from Amazon, the company revealed Friday.
According to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based business that created the Claude chatbot and AI model, the internet giant’s total investment now stands at $8 billion, with Amazon continuing to hold a minority stake.
Additionally, a blog post announced that Amazon Web Services will be Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic will now train and implement its biggest AI models using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.
Claude, a chatbot developed by Anthropic, has become quite popular, much like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In an industry expected to generate over $1 trillion in revenue in the next ten years, tech behemoths like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are engaged in a generative AI arms race alongside startups like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Some, such as Microsoft and Amazon, are developing in-house generative AI and making significant investments in generative AI companies.
Through the relationship, which was announced on Friday, AWS users will also have “early access” to an Anthropic feature: the option to fine-tune their own data on Anthropic’s Claude. According to a blog post from the firm, it’s a special perk for AWS clients.
Amazon made its biggest outside investment in its three-decade history in March when it invested $2.75 billion in Anthropic. In September 2023, the firms announced their first investment of $1.25 billion.
Amazon is not represented on the board of Anthropic. One month after Anthropic revealed a major milestone for the company—AI bots that can utilize a computer to accomplish complicated tasks like a person would—the news of Amazon’s extra investment was released.
One of Anthropic’s two most recent AI models, Computer Use, enables its technicians to use any program and browse the internet in real time, analyze what’s on a computer screen, choose buttons, type text, and traverse webpages.
In an interview with CNBC last month, Anthropic’s chief science officer, Jared Kaplan, stated that the tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do” and that it can do jobs involving “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
According to what Anthropic told CNBC at the time, Amazon had early access to the technology, and Asana, Canva, and Notion were among the first users and beta testers. Kaplan said the business has been developing the technology since the beginning of this year.
Claude Enterprise, Anthropic’s largest new product since the launch of its chatbot, was released in September and is intended for companies wishing to use Anthropic’s AI. The firm launched its “Team” plan for smaller organizations in May and its more potent AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, in June.
After previously announcing that it had acquired a 10% investment in the startup and a significant cloud contract between the two businesses, Google said last year that it would spend $2 billion in Anthropic.
