Amazon to invest another $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

This will bring Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic – which began last year – to $8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant would maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, founded by former executives of Microsoft-linked OpenAI.

As part of the deal, Amazon said San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its “primary training partner.” It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot.

“We have been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and its commitment to the responsible development of generative AI, and we look forward to deepening our collaboration,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, in a statement included in Amazon’s announcement.

The relationship between big tech companies and AI startups has come under scrutiny from regulators in the United States and abroad. However, Amazon received some good news in September when Britain’s competition watchdog said Anthropic’s revenue and combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not significant enough to require an investigation. thoroughly under the country’s merger rules.