Amazon invests another $4bn in AI start-up Anthropic

Amazon has invested another $4 billion in the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, bringing its total backing for the company to $8 billion as the race by Big Tech to dominate the sector continues.
With its Claude generative artificial intelligence software, Anthropic is one of the closest rivals to OpenAI with its ChatGPT program, which remains the most popular AI tool.
The deal will make Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s lucrative cloud-computing division, the primary source of computer power to train Anthropic’s large language models.
Amazon will “maintain its position as a minority investor”, the company said. “By leveraging AWS’s robust security features and compliance certifications, organisations can confidently deploy AI solutions that meet stringent regulatory requirements”, such as governments, it said.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former members of OpenAI, including the siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. They had left OpenAI amid concerns about how to ensure the safe development of the technology and the business has made its pitch to customers all about “safety and controllability”.
Other investors include Salesforce and Google. At its inception it raised $500 million from FTX, the collapsed crypto company run by Sam Bankman-Fried. Part of that stake was sold off during the bankruptcy proceedings that came after FTX’s demise.
Anthropic places heavy emphasis on safety and its chatbot strives to be the most punctilious in the market. It recently launched a new version which it said outperformed its rivals including Google and OpenAI.
In a joint statement, the companies said that “by combining Anthropic’s expertise in frontier AI systems with AWS’s world-class infrastructure, we’re building a secure, enterprise-ready platform that gives organisations of all sizes access to the forefront of AI technology”.
The news of the investment comes a few months after the UK’s competition authority closed an investigation into Amazon’s investment in Anthropic, which was looking at whether it was a merger by stealth, because it decided that the partnership did not qualify.
According to Bloomberg, the US Department of Justice is pushing to unwind Google‘s partnership with Anthropic as part of a competition case concerning its monopoly over online search.
Big Tech companies have been placing enormous bets on the frontier AI developers, such as Microsoft’s multibillion dollar partnership with OpenAI, as they compete to develop increasingly sophisticated technology that can mimic human output such as writing, speech or images, called “generative AI”.
The data heavy large-language models that power the technology need vast amounts of computer power to train and run, hence the involvement of the deep-pocketed companies that have the necessary data centre infrastructure and processors.