In the escalating tech war, Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in AI firm Anthropic

Anthropic and Amazon announced on Monday that Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic and acquiring a minority ownership in the artificial intelligence business.

The investment demonstrates the massive financial commitment that Big Tech companies are making to AI in an attempt to take advantage of the opportunities that the newest iteration of the technology is expected to create.

The agreement, according to Amazon and Anthropic, is a component of a larger partnership to create «foundation models,» which serve as the basis for the generative AI systems that have drawn interest from all over the world.

To create text, images, and videos that mimic human effort, foundation models—also referred to as massive language models—are trained on enormous amounts of web data, including blog posts, e-books, scientific articles, and popular tunes.

As part of the deal, Anthropic will use Amazon as its main cloud computing provider and will train and implement its generative AI systems on the company’s proprietary processors.

Amazon is battling to overtake competitors such as Microsoft, which made a $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019 and then another multibillion-dollar investment at the beginning of the year.