Amazon has announced that it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a startup specializing in generative AI chatbots. This follows Google’s $300 million investment in Anthropic last year, which gave Google an estimated 10% stake in the company. Amazon’s investment will not only provide a substantial financial boost to Anthropic but also grant the startup access to tools for AI developers and products being developed by Amazon, including computing chips, large language models, and cloud computing capabilities under Amazon Web Services. This partnership allows Amazon to expand its AI capabilities within AWS and offer customers a wider range of generative AI applications.
The deal between Amazon and Anthropic involves an upfront investment of $1.25 billion, with the potential for an additional $2.75 billion later, bringing the total investment to $4 billion. Anthropic will have access to Amazon’s new AI chips, including the Trainium chip for training machine learning models and the Inferentia chip for running the models. The majority of Anthropic’s work will be done on the AWS cloud. Amazon and Anthropic had already been collaborating since the spring, with Anthropic making its models available via Amazon’s Bedrock service. The two companies will continue working together to help AWS customers develop their own generative AI applications.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by Daniela and Dario Amodei, emphasizes the safety and reliability of its AI technology. Its flagship product is the Claude generative AI assistant, which can ask clarifying questions to understand prompts. The company operates on a freemium model, offering a basic version of its chatbot for free and a more powerful version for a monthly fee. With this investment from Amazon, Anthropic will be able to further enhance its AI capabilities and expand its customer base.