Amazon will invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI’s main opponent

Amazon announced on Friday that it will invest an extra $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup created by former OpenAI research officials.

The latest cash takes the internet giant’s overall commitment to $8 billion, while Amazon will remain a minority partner, according to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based business behind the Claude chatbot and AI model.

Anthropic will also use Amazon Web Services as its «primary cloud and training partner,» according to a blog post. Anthropic will now employ AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.

Anthropic is the firm behind Claude, a chatbot that has surged in popularity, alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as digital behemoths like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, are all engaged in a generative AI arms race to avoid falling behind in a sector expected to reach $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Some companies, including as Microsoft and Amazon, are investing heavily in generative AI firms while also developing their own.

The agreement announced on Friday will also provide AWS customers with «early access» to an Anthropic feature: the option to fine-tune Anthropic’s Claude using their own data. According to a corporate blog post, this is a one-of-a-kind perk for AWS users.

Amazon invested $2.75 billion in Anthropic in March, making it the company’s largest outside investment in three decades. The firms announced an initial investment of $1.25 billion in September 2023.

Amazon does not have a seat on the Anthropic board.