Amazon On Friday, it announced it would invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives.
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 the chatbot and messaging model. AI Claude.
Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner,” according to a blog post. Now, 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’s Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, alongside tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft And Metaare all part of a generative AI arms race to ensure they don’t fall behind a market. expected to exceed $1 trillion income in a decade.
Some, like Microsoft and Amazon, are supporting generative AI startups with significant investments as well as working on generative AI internally.
The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers to have “early access” to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to make precise adjustments with their own data on Anthropic’s Claude. This is a unique benefit for AWS customers, according to a company 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 companies announced a initial investment of $1.25 billion in September 2023.
Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic’s board of directors.
News of Amazon’s additional investment comes a month later Anthropic announced an important step for the company: AI agents capable of using a computer to carry out complex tasks like a human would.
Anthropic’s new computer-use capability, part of its latest two AI models, allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites, and perform tasks through any software and real-time Internet browsing.
The tool can “use computers essentially the same way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC in an interview last month, adding that it can perform tasks with “dozens, even hundreds of steps.
Amazon got early access to the tool, Anthropic told CNBC at the time, and early customers and beta testers included Asana, Canva and Notion. The company had been working on the tool since the beginning of this year, according to Kaplan.
In September, Anthropic deployed Claude Entrepriseits biggest new product since the debut of its chatbot, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic’s AI. In Junethe company launched its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May it rolled out its “Team” plan for small businesses.
Last year, Google engaged investing $2 billion in Anthropic, having previously confirmed it had taken a 10% stake in the startup alongside a major cloud deal between the two companies.