Amazon to invest $4bn more in Anthropic, OpenAI rival

• Published On: 23 November 2024 at 13:48

Amazon said that it would spend an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, bringing the total investment to $8 billion.

However, Amazon will retain a minority ownership in the San Francisco-based AI business that created the Claude chatbot and AI model.

Amazon Web Services will become Anthropic's "primary cloud and training partner," according to CNBC.

Moving forward, Anthropic's largest AI models will be trained and deployed using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.

Anthropic, the firm behind the popular Claude chatbot, competes in generative AI with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as digital behemoths like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, are battling for dominance in an industry that is estimated to generate more than $1 trillion in revenue over the next decade.

Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are making large investments in generative AI firms while also developing their own in-house AI capabilities.

The agreement announced on Friday will also provide AWS customers with "early access" to an Anthropic feature: the option to fine-tune Anthropic's Claude using their own data. According to a corporate blog post, this is a one-of-a-kind perk for AWS users.

In March, Amazon made its largest outside investment in three decades, committing $2.75 billion to Anthropic. This comes after an initial $1.25 billion investment announced in September 2023.

Amazon's new investment in Anthropic comes barely a month after the company revealed a big milestone: the development of AI agents that can use a computer to do complicated jobs like a person.

Anthropic's new "Computer Use" capability, built into its two most recent AI models, allows the technology to comprehend computer screens, pick buttons, enter text, explore websites, and do activities across several software programs, including real-time internet browsing.

In an interview, Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, stated that the tool can "use computers in basically the same way that we do," and that it can do jobs involving "tens or even hundreds of steps."

According to Anthropic, Amazon received early access to the technology, and Asana, Canva, and Notion were among the first clients and beta testers. According to Kaplan, the company began developing the tool earlier this year.