Amazon Announces Up to $4 Billion Investment in AI Startup Anthropic

Amazon announced this morning that it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company developing a ChatGPT-like assistant named Claude. As part of the new strategic collaboration, Anthropic will provide access to its future AI models to AWS customers using Amazon Bedrock, the company’s solution for developing generative AI apps at scale.

Anthropic has been an AWS customer since 2021, but the company today made a commitment to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to develop its future AI models. Claude 2, the company’s latest AI model announced back in July can help users to perform various tasks including summarizing content, writing code, and more. This Claude 2 model will soon be available for AWS customers via Amazon Bedrock.

“Organizations will be able to use Claude 2 for a wide range of tasks, from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction. Our industry-leading 100,000 token context window will help them securely process extensive amounts of information—including technical, domain-specific documents for use cases across finance, legal, coding, and more,” the San Francisco-based startup explained in a separate press release.

Reuters is also reporting that Amazon’s immediate investment in Anthropic is limited to $1.25 billion, but the company could eventually raise it to $4 billion. The e-commerce and cloud giant said that this investment would give it “minority ownership position in the company,” but that it wouldn’t get a board seat.

While the multi-billion dollar investment is a big sign of Amazon being ready to keep up with the generative AI race, a company like Microsoft has been more aggressive, investing over $10 billion in the ChatGPT maker OpenAI to democratize its technology via its new Azure Open AI platform. Microsoft also leveraged OpenAI’s technology to create new “Copilot” experiences across Bing, Windows, and Microsoft 365.

If Amazon did reveal new generative features for its AI assistant Alexa last week, today’s announcement is really targeted at app developers. “Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said today.