Amazon has announced its commitment to invest a substantial sum of up to $4 billion in the AI startup known as Anthropic. This strategic move is part of Amazon’s effort to intensify its competition with tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia in the rapidly expanding field of artificial intelligence—a realm highly anticipated by many in the technology community as the next significant frontier.
Initially, Amazon will infuse $1.25 billion into Anthropic, securing a minority stake in the company. Anthropic, akin to Google’s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, specializes in AI-driven text analysis chatbots. Furthermore, Amazon retains the option to expand its investment in Anthropic to reach the total of $4 billion.
Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported Anthropic’s intention to raise up to $5 billion over the next two years. Anthropic, which already boasts Google as an investor, recently introduced its first premium subscription plan for the chatbot Claude 2, designed for consumer use. Their ambitious goal is to develop an advanced “frontier model,” tentatively named “Claude-Next,” which aims to be ten times more powerful than the most cutting-edge AI models available today. This ambitious endeavor, however, necessitates an investment of one billion dollars within the next 18 months. (Notably, Microsoft has allocated as much as $11 billion in support of OpenAI over time.)
Amazon’s involvement as a deep-pocketed strategic investor holds the promise of not only financial support but also access to substantial computational resources, which will be pivotal in constructing future AI models. Additionally, Amazon will assist in marketing these innovations to a wide array of cloud customers.
As part of their agreement, Anthropic will utilize Amazon’s AWS as the primary cloud provider for critical tasks such as safety research and the development of future foundation models. They will also harness AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for model building, training, and deployment—a partnership that has been in place since 2021.
Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, expressed optimism about the collaboration with Anthropic, believing that it will enhance customer experiences and deliver more value through Amazon’s various AI-related capabilities, such as Amazon Bedrock and AWS Trainium.
Anthropic, which boasts support from investors like Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Zoom, has amassed a total funding of $2.7 billion to date. In May of the current year, it achieved a valuation of around $5 billion when it secured $450 million in funding. The precise valuation assigned by Amazon in this recent investment was not disclosed.
This partnership allows Amazon, which is increasingly asserting its presence in the AI landscape, to bolster its resources in this rapidly evolving industry.
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, expressed his confidence in the company’s technology, highlighting the remarkable growth in the scale of training neural networks over the past decade and the potential for even more substantial advancements in the coming years.
Anthropic has committed to providing AWS customers worldwide with access to upcoming iterations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock—a fully managed service that offers secure access to industry-leading foundation models. Additionally, Anthropic will grant AWS customers early access to exclusive features for model customization and fine-tuning.
In a statement, Anthropic emphasized the resource-intensive nature of training state-of-the-art models and welcomed Amazon’s investment and provision of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology, which will bolster their efforts in advancing AI safety and research. They look forward to collaborating with Amazon to responsibly expand the adoption of Claude and deliver secure AI cloud technologies to organizations globally.
