Amazon Invests Another $4B In AI Firm Anthropic

Amazon said it will invest $8 billion in AI firm Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the company to $8 billion over just the past few months.

The companies teamed up last September, with Amazon putting in $4 billion and Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services its primary cloud provider.’

The new agreement will see Anthropic name Amazon’s AWS as its primary training partner, in addition to continuing to be its primary cloud provider. The company will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future AI models.

The partnership will also give customers of AWS early access to the ability to fine-tune their own data on Anthropic models, the companies said in a press release. Anthropic is known as the company behind Claude, a family of large-language models.

The deal comes as a wide range of businesses across most parts of the economy (particularly the tech sector) have been pouring billions into AI.

“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said. “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. We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration.”

Tens of thousands of customers, from startups to enterprises and government institutions, are using Anthropic’s AI models in the AWS cloud, the press release said. The tech is powering everything from customer service chatbots, coding assistants, and translation applications, to drug discovery, engineering design, and complex business processes.

“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.”