Amazon announced it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, increasing its total investment to $8 billion.
However, Amazon will continue to hold a minority stake in the San Francisco-based AI startup, which is behind the Claude chatbot and AI model.
Amazon Web Services will become Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner,” according to CNBC.
Moving forward, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
Anthropic, the company behind the popular Claude chatbot, is part of a growing competition in generative AI, alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, are all vying for dominance in a market expected to exceed $1 trillion in revenue within the next decade.
Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are supporting generative AI startups with significant investments while also developing their own in-house AI technologies.
The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers “early access” to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic’s Claude. It’s a unique benefit for AWS customers, according to a company blog post.
In March, Amazon made its largest outside investment in its three-decade history, contributing $2.75 billion to Anthropic. This followed an initial $1.25 billion investment announced in September 2023.
Amazon’s additional investment in Anthropic comes just a month after the company announced a major milestone: the development of AI agents capable of using a computer to perform complex tasks like a human.
Anthropic’s new “Computer Use” capability, integrated into its two latest AI models, enables the technology to interpret computer screens, select buttons, input text, navigate websites, and perform tasks across various software applications, including real-time internet browsing.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, said in an interview, adding it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
Amazon had early access to the tool, Anthropic said at the time, and early customers and beta testers included Asana, Canva and Notion. The company had been working on the tool since early this year, according to Kaplan.
