Amazon said it will invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, as Amazon looks to further solidify its spot in the growing technology sector. The investment will also give Amazon a minority ownership position at the company.
Amazon and Anthropic announced their partnership to advance generative AI on Monday, just days after the e-commerce company unveiled a massive upgrade to Alexa. The upgrade will bring more human-sounding interactions and smarter digital assist to better understand context and personal preferences.
Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider for safety research and mission critical workloads. It will also use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy future foundation models.
“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. “Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
In addition, Amazon developers and engineers will be able to work with Anthropic models through Amazon Bedrock to better incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, bolster existing applications and create new customer experiences for Amazon businesses.
“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said in a statement. “Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”