Amazon has struck a deal to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, fueling the development of trusted large language models. This marks Amazon’s latest move to capitalize on the transformative potential of next-generation AI.
Under the agreement, Amazon will acquire a minority stake in Anthropic, initially starting with $1.25 billion. Both companies have the option to increase the total investment to $4 billion going forward.
The collaboration aims to accelerate Anthropic’s work on high-performing and reliable foundation models for natural language processing. Amazon sees huge promise in Anthropic’s ethically-aligned approach to AI safety.
Anthropic will rely extensively on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure and services to train and deploy its models. This includes utilizing AWS’s proprietary AI chips like Trainium and Inferentia to efficiently scale its compute needs.
In return, Amazon and AWS customers will get early access to integrate Anthropic’s technology like its Claude language model into their own businesses.
Anthropic has committed to further expanding its support for AWS’s model hosting platform, Bedrock. This will enable secure customization and fine-tuning of Claude on the cloud for optimized domain performance while guarding against harmful outcomes.
The deal positions Amazon to benefit from the rising demand for Claude among its cloud user base. Anthropic will also inform AWS’s own development of responsible and scalable foundation models.
Google previously invested $300 million in Anthropic last year. And earlier this year, Anthropic raised additional financing at an estimated $5 billion valuation. Amazon’s bet highlights the intense interest in Anthropic’s safety-focused approach.
It seems that Anthropic is following a similar path to OpenAI, exact implications of this “minority stake” are unclear at the moment.
Amazon’s cloud infrastructure and reach will provide the foundation for Anthropic to keep advancing state-of-the-art natural language AI. In turn, access to these next-gen capabilities will help Amazon and AWS users tap into new opportunities and use cases.
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