Amazon on Friday announced it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives.<\/p>\n
The new funding brings the tech giant\u2019s total investment to $8 billion, though Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company behind the Claude chatbot and AI model.<\/p>\n
Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic\u2019s \u201cprimary cloud and training partner,\u201d according to a blog post. From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.<\/p>\n
Anthropic is the company behind Claude \u2014 one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, alongside tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are all part of a generative AI arms race to ensure they don\u2019t fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.<\/p>\n
Some, like Microsoft and Amazon, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as working on in-house generative AI.<\/p>\n
The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers \u201cearly access\u201d to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic\u2019s Claude. It\u2019s a unique benefit for AWS customers, according to a company blog post.<\/p>\n
In March, Amazon\u2019s $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company\u2019s largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September 2023.<\/p>\n
Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic\u2019s board.<\/p>\n
News of Amazon\u2019s additional investment comes one month after Anthropic announced a significant milestone for the company: AI agents that can use a computer to complete complex tasks like a human would.<\/p>\n
Anthropic\u2019s new Computer Use capability, part of its two newest AI models, allows its tech to interpret what\u2019s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites, and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing.<\/p>\n
The tool can \u201cuse computers in basically the same way that we do,\u201d Jared Kaplan, Anthropic\u2019s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview last month, adding it can do tasks with \u201ctens or even hundreds of steps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amazon had early access to the tool, Anthropic told CNBC at the time, and early customers and beta testers included Asana, Canva and Notion. The company had been working on the tool since early this year, according to Kaplan.<\/p>\n
In September, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot\u2019s debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic\u2019s AI. In June, the company debuted its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May, it rolled out its \u201cTeam\u201d plan for smaller businesses.<\/p>\n
Last year, Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup alongside a large cloud contract between the two companies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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