Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI upstart Anthropic

Recent times have seen companies make moves to carve a large slice of the AI industry, moves which generative AI’s onset has only accelerated. This time, Amazon announced that it will be investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic – the AI startup that gave us the Claude and Claude 2 chatbots this year.

According to the official statements by both Amazon and Anthropic, this multi-billion-dollar investment will be carried out in stages, with an initial commitment of $1.25 billion by Amazon to obtain a minority stake in Anthropic. Importantly, Amazon retains the option to increase its investment to reach the total $4 billion mark. While this investment might pale in comparison to Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in OpenAI, it is a clear indication of Amazon’s ambitions in the rapidly-expanding AI arms race.

“Today, we’re announcing that Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop the most reliable and high-performing foundation models in the industry. Our frontier safety research and products, together with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) expertise in running secure, reliable infrastructure, will make Anthropic’s safe and steerable AI widely accessible to AWS customers” read an official statement on the matter.

For its part Anthropic is known to work on its innovative AI models and aims to develop advanced AI technologies that are safer and more reliable. Their flagship model, Claude, and its successor, Claude 2, are large language model-based chatbots that are comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. However, what sets Anthropic’s models apart is the fact that Claude can revise its own responses without human intervention, making it a standout choice for applications requiring precise and secure AI-driven interactions.

Speaking more about the development, beyond the financial investment, Amazon’s involvement in Anthropic opens up opportunities for strategic collaboration. Amazon plans to incorporate Anthropic’s technology into various products across its business operations. Amazon Bedrock, a service for building AI applications, will integrate Anthropic’s AI capabilities. Additionally, Amazon intends to leverage Anthropic’s technology to enhance existing offerings and create new customer experiences.

“Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including compute power and research programs. Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research,” Anthropic said in its statement. “We look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale adoption of Claude and deliver safe AI cloud technologies to organizations around the world.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) – a big moneymaker for Amazon – also stands to benefit significantly from this partnership. Anthropic has agreed to make AWS its primary cloud provider for critical workloads, including safety research and future AI model development. The startup will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to “build, train, and deploy its future foundation models, benefitting from the price, performance, scale, and security of AWS.”