Amazon plans $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon is planning to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic. The company will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake, with an option to boost the investment. Anthropic plans to create an advanced AI model, “Claude-Next,” most importantly surpassing current capabilities, and recently introduced a premium subscription for their chatbot Claude 2. Google also backs  Anthropic and aims to secure a total of $5 billion over the next two years.

Amazon, a multinational conglomerate, is known for its wide-ranging ventures encompassing e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, artificial intelligence, and more. It was established in 1994 by Jeff Bezos as an online marketplace for books. After that, it rapidly changed into a sprawling platform offering an extensive array of products and services.

This investment will span 18 months, necessitating substantial spending. Anthropic considers Amazon a strategic investor, providing not only financial backing but also access to computing power via Amazon’s AWS, helping in the development and deployment of future AI models. According to Amazon’s CEO, Amazon’s cloud services will be instrumental for mission-critical work and foundational AI model development, improving customer experiences through this partnership.

Amazon’s significant investment in Anthropic marks a strategic move within the quickly growing AI industry. Earlier this year, Anthropic secured $2.7 billion and achieved a valuation of $5 billion. The partnership will bolster Amazon’s AI capabilities, utilizing Anthropic’s expertise to improve services like Amazon Bedrock and AWS Trainium. Anthropic’s CEO foresees significant advancements in AI technology, highlighting the remarkable scaling potential in neural net training. This collaboration plans to give AWS customers worldwide with access to cutting-edge foundation models and AI technologies. Moreover, this contributes to the responsible and safe growth of AI adoption.