Amazon expands investment in startup AI developer by $4 billion
Amazon is deepening an existing multi-billion-dollar commitment to a provider of next-generation artificial intelligence technology.
The company is investing $4 billion in generative AI developer Anthropic. This follows an initial $4 billion investment Amazon made into Anthropic in September 2023 which was completed in March 2024 and represented at the time its largest-ever venture capital investment. (Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor.)
In addition, Anthropic is naming the Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted cloud services subsidiary of Amazon as its primary training partner, building on existing agreements for AWS to serve as its primary cloud provider and for Anthropic to AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models.
The two companies will also continue collaborating in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology and expand upon the existing integration between AWS and Anthropic’s Claude generative AI foundation model.
Claude is a competitor with ChatGPT, a generative AI model developed by OpenAI which interacts with users in a conversational style that mimics human interaction and uses machine learning to continually refine and improve its responses.
The next phase of the collaboration will enhance the performance Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service from AWS, provides for customers running Claude models.
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"The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," said Matt Garman, AWS CEO. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies."
Anthropic and AWS have also collaborated to give AWS customers early access to the ability to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic models, a customization benefit that AWS customers will uniquely have for each model for a period of time on new Claude models.
"This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock," said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. "We’re looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology."
