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Amazon ana announced it will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded by a former OpenAI research executive.
The new funding brings the tech giant’s total investment to $8 billion, although Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company behind Claude’s chatbot and AI models.
Amazon Web Services will also be Anthropic’s “leading cloud and training partner,” according to the blog post. From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
Anthropic is the company behind Claude – one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are all part of the generative AI arms race to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market predicted to reach $1 trillion in revenue in ten years. Some, like Microsoft and Amazon, support generative AI startups with huge investments as well as work on generative AI in-house.
The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers “early access” to an Anthropic feature: the ability for AWS customers to perform fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic’s Claude. This is a unique benefit for AWS customers, according to the company’s blog post.
In March, Amazon’s $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company’s largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The company announced an initial investment of $1.25 billion in September 2023.
Amazon doesn’t have a seat on Anthropic’s board.
The news of Amazon’s additional investment comes a month after Anthropic announced a major milestone for the company: AI agents that can use computers to complete complex tasks like humans.
Anthropic’s new Computer Use Capabilities, part of the two latest AI models, allow the technology to interpret what’s on the computer screen, select buttons, type text, navigate websites and perform tasks through software and internet browsing in real time.
The tool can “use a computer in the same way,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview last month, adding that it can perform tasks in “dozens or even hundreds of steps.”
Amazon has early access to the tool, Anthropic told CNBC at the time, and early customers and beta testers include Asana, Canva and Notion. The company has been working on the tool since earlier this year, according to Kaplan.
In September, Anthropic launched Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since the chatbot’s debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic AI. In June, the company launched a more powerful AI model, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May, it launched a “Team” plan for small businesses.
Last year, Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, after previously confirming that it had taken a 10% stake in the startup along with a large cloud contract between the two companies.
