Amazon Deepens AI Partnership with Anthropic, Investing Additional $4 Billion

Amazon Invests USD 4 Billion More in Anthropic, Expands AI Partnership

Enterprise users, including Pfizer and the European Parliament, leverage Claude to streamline operations. Amazon has expanded its collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, announcing an additional USD 4 billion investment that raises its total stake to USD 8 billion. The partnership designates Amazon Web Services (AWS) as Anthropic's primary cloud and training partner, focusing on the development and deployment of advanced AI systems. Furthermore, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models. Both companies will continue to work closely to advance Trainium's hardware and software capabilities. Also Read: Amazon Invests USD 110 Million to Boost AI Research with Free Access to Trainium Chips Anthropic is working closing with AWS's Annapurna Labs on the development and optimisation of future generations of Trainium accelerators, advancing the capabilities of specialised machine learning hardware. "Through deep technical collaboration, we're writing low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon, and contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium," the companies announced. Anthropic engineers are working with Annapurna's chip design team to maximise computational efficiency from the hardware, which the company plans to leverage for training its most advanced AI foundation models. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," said Matt Garman, AWS CEO. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration." "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology," said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Claude 3.5 Sonnet, recently upgraded with advanced agentic capabilities, including computer use, outperforms all publicly available models on agentic coding tasks, according to Anthropic's testing. Also Read: AMD to Lay Off 4 percent Workforce to Focus on AI Chip Development: Report Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude, has emerged as a core tool for businesses via Amazon Bedrock. Claude, a large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic, supports organisations such as Pfizer, Intuit, Perplexity, and the European Parliament with tasks ranging from accelerating drug development and simplifying tax calculations to document analysis, significantly reducing operational time and costs. According to Anthropic, the European Parliament uses Claude to power "Archibot," making 2.1 million official documents instantly searchable and easier to analyse in multiple languages while reducing research time by 80 percent. Also Read: AI Can Be a Game-Changer for Europe's Economic Growth: Report Claude's integration with AWS enables organisations to fine-tune Claude models in Amazon Bedrock, including Claude 3 Haiku, to tailor outputs to their specific requirements and boost accuracy for domain-specific tasks securely while meeting stringent regulatory standards. "Government customers and industry partners can access Claude's capabilities through Amazon Bedrock in AWS GovCloud (US). Additionally, government customers can access Claude through Amazon SageMaker in highly controlled environments like the AWS Secret and Top Secret Cloud Regions," the companies said. Also Read: Anthropic, Palantir, and AWS Partner to Bring Claude AI Models to US Defense Operations This expanded partnership will combine Anthropic's AI expertise with AWS's infrastructure to create enterprise-ready platforms, accelerating AI innovation for organisations of all sizes. Amazon noted that Anthropic's advanced generative AI, combined with Amazon Bedrock's secure access to top industry foundation models, powers diverse applications such as customer service chatbots, coding tools, translation, drug discovery, and engineering design. Customers include ADP, Amdocs, Airtable, BrainBox AI, Cloudera, DoorDash, Genesys, GoDaddy, Intuit, LexisNexis, Moody's, Nomura Holdings, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, Siemens, T-Mobile, Zendesk, and many others across industries.

Amazon Just Invested Another $4 Billion in AI Startup Anthropic

Anthropic, one of the world's top providers of advanced AI models, has announced a massive $4 billion investment from Amazon, bringing the tech and shopping giant's total investment in the AI firm to $8 billion. In an official news update on its website, Anthropic stated that the investment establishes Amazon Web Services as its primary "cloud and training partner." The companies will collaborate to create new "Trainium" accelerator chips, which provide the computation power necessary for training the next-generation of Anthropic's Claude family of AI models. When Amazon invested the initial $4 billion in Anthropic in September 2023, the AI firm agreed to use Amazon's data centers and its cloud computing platform, Bedrock. The move can be seen as equivalent to Microsoft's eye-popping $11 billion investment in OpenAI from January 2023; Microsoft has hitched its AI ambitions to OpenAI, while Amazon has done the same with Anthropic. Amazon also announced that Amazon Web Services customers will get first dibs at fine-tuning Anthropic's Claude models on their own data, making them more capable of handling workplace-specific tasks.

Amazon is investing another $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

AI can do the work of countless stock market analysts and more, exec says In the next phase of their collaboration, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as its primary partner for training its AI models, the companies announced on Friday. AWS was named Anthropic's primary cloud provider through their initial deal last September. Anthropic will use the cloud giant's in-house training and inferencing chips, Trainium and Inferentia, for training and deploying its foundation models, or AI models that are trained on large amounts of data. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," Matt Garman, chief executive of AWS, said in a statement. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies." Amazon added Anthropic's model family, Claude, to Bedrock last April. In June, Anthropic debuted its latest Claude model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it said is twice as fast as its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus. The AI startup claimed Claude 3.5 outperformed both OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's (GOOGL-1.19%) Gemini 1.5 Pro on a series of benchmarks including graduate-level reasoning, code, and multilingual math. "This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock," Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said in a statement. "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology." AWS's first $4 billion deal with Anthropic was its largest investment in an outside company ever. Last September, AWS invested an initial $1.25 billion into the startup. It completed the investment in March with an additional $2.75 billion.

Amazon deepens partnership with Anthropic, invests additional $4bn By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Amazon has announced an expanded partnership with artificial intelligence company Anthropic, committing an additional $4 billion investment. The move deepens their collaboration first revealed in September 2023 when Anthropic named Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS) its primary cloud provider, according to a press release. Anthropic has now designated AWS as its primary training partner and will leverage AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its latest AI models, including the highly successful Claude series. The collaboration is expected to focus on advancing Trainium's hardware and software capabilities, enhancing the performance and security of Claude models available on Amazon Bedrock. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS. He added that the joint efforts will continue to push the boundaries of generative AI technologies. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei emphasized the partnership's role in driving innovation: "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium." The Claude series has gained traction among AWS customers, including companies like Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), T-Mobile, and DoorDash (NASDAQ:DASH), for powering applications ranging from customer service to drug discovery. Amazon said Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, introduced in 2024, has set benchmarks in AI performance, particularly for coding tasks. Through this partnership, AWS customers will gain exclusive access to fine-tuning Claude models with their own data, a feature designed to boost customization and performance.

Amazon doubles down on AI startup Anthropic with $4 billion investment

(Reuters) -Amazon.com pumped in an additional $4 billion into artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, as the e-commerce giant goes up against Big Tech rivals in a race to capitalize on generative AI technology. This doubles Amazon's investment in the firm known for its GenAI chatbot Claude, but it remains a minority investor, the startup said on Friday. Amazon will also be Anthropic's main training partner for AI models. Amazon, which is Anthropic's primary cloud partner, is fiercely competing with Microsoft and Alphabet's Google to offer AI-powered tools for its cloud customers. "The investment in Anthropic is essential for Amazon to stay in a leadership position in AI," said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. The e-commerce company's increased investment in Anthropic underscores the billions of dollars funneled into AI startups over the past year, as investors look to cash in on a boom in the technology, which became popular with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022. Microsoft-backed OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors last month, which could value the company at $157 billion and cement its position as one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Anthropic plans to train and deploy its foundational models on Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips. The intensive process of training AI models requires powerful processors, making securing pricey AI chips a top priority for startups. "It (partnership) also allows Amazon to promote its AI services such as leveraging its AI chips for training and inferencing, which Anthropic is using," Luria said. Nvidia currently dominates the market for AI processors and counts Amazon among its long list of so-called hyperscaler customers. Still, Amazon has been working to develop its own chips through its Annapurna Labs division, which Anthropic said it was "working closely with" to aid in developing processors. Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest another $1.5 billion over time. The startup also uses Alphabet's Google Cloud services as part of its operations. (Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri, Anil D'Silva and Shilpi Majumdar)

Amazon to invest an additional $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

(AP) - Amazon is investing an additional USD4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic - which began last year - to USD8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, which former leaders of the Microsoft-linked OpenAI founded. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its "primary training partner." It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in a statement included in Amazon's announcement. The relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups has received scrutiny from regulators in the US and abroad. However, Amazon got some good news in September when Britain's competition watchdog said Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules.

Amazon to invest an additional $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic -- which began last year -- to $8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, which was founded by former leaders of the Microsoft-linked OpenAI. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its "primary training partner." It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in a statement included in Amazon's announcement. The relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups has received scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and abroad. However, Amazon got some good news in September when Britain's competition watchdog said Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules.

Amazon to invest an additional $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic - which began last year - to $8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, which was founded by former leaders of the Microsoft-linked OpenAI. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its "primary training partner." It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in a statement included in Amazon's announcement. The relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups has received scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and abroad. However, Amazon got some good news in September when Britain's competition watchdog said Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules.

Amazon Doubles Down on AI Startup Anthropic With Another $4 Billion

Anthropic is in talks with additional investors to raise more capital Amazon.com pumped another $4 billion into OpenAI competitor Anthropic, as the e-commerce giant goes up against Big Tech rivals in a race to capitalize on generative artificial intelligence technology. This doubles Amazon's investment in the firm known for its GenAI chatbot Claude, but it remains a minority investor, the startup said on Friday. Similar to Amazon's previous $4 billion investment, it comes in the form of convertible notes and comes in phases, first at $1.3 billion. Anthropic is also in talks with additional investors to raise more capital on the back of Amazon backing, sources added, who requested anonymity for discussing private matters. Anthropic declined to comment. Amazon, which has gradually established itself as Anthropic's primary cloud partner, is fiercely competing with Microsoft and Alphabet's Google to offer AI-powered tools for its cloud customers. AWS is bringing significant revenue to Anthropic as a major distributor of its latest models. "The investment in Anthropic is essential for Amazon to stay in a leadership position in AI," said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. The e-commerce company's increased investment in Anthropic underscores the billions of dollars funneled into AI startups over the past year, as investors look to cash in on a boom in the technology, which became popular with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022. Microsoft-backed OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors last month, which could value the company at $157 billion and cement its position as one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Anthropic plans to train and deploy its foundational models on Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips. The intensive process of training AI models requires powerful processors, making securing pricey AI chips a top priority for startups. "It (partnership) also allows Amazon to promote its AI services such as leveraging its AI chips for training and inferencing, which Anthropic is using," Luria said. Nvidia currently dominates the market for AI processors and counts Amazon among its long list of so-called hyperscaler customers. Still, Amazon has been working to develop its own chips through its Annapurna Labs division, which Anthropic said it was "working closely with" to aid in developing processors. Amazon has also been trying to build its own AI model code-named "Olympus," which it hasn't released. Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest another $1.5 billion over time. The startup also uses Alphabet's Google Cloud services as part of its operations.

Amazon to invest an additional $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic - which began last year - to $8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, which was founded by former leaders of the Microsoft-linked OpenAI. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its "primary training partner." It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in a statement included in Amazon's announcement. The relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups has received scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and abroad. However, Amazon got some good news in September when Britain's competition watchdog said Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules.

Amazon to invest an additional $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic -- which began last year -- to $8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, which was founded by former leaders of the Microsoft-linked OpenAI. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its "primary training partner." It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in a statement included in Amazon's announcement. The relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups has received scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and abroad. However, Amazon got some good news in September when Britain's competition watchdog said Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules.

Amazon to Invest an Additional $4 Billion in AI Startup Anthropic

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic - which began last year - to $8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, which was founded by former leaders of the Microsoft-linked OpenAI. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its "primary training partner." It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in a statement included in Amazon's announcement. The relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups has received scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and abroad. However, Amazon got some good news in September when Britain's competition watchdog said Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival

Amazon on Friday announced it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives. The new funding brings the tech giant's 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. Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic's "primary cloud and training partner," according to a blog post. From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models. Anthropic is the company behind Claude -- one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's 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't fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Some, like Microsoft and Amazon, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as working on in-house generative AI. The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers "early access" to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic's Claude. It's a unique benefit for AWS customers, according to a company blog post. In March, Amazon's $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company's largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September 2023. Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic's board. News of Amazon's 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. Anthropic's new Computer Use capability, part of its two newest AI models, allows its tech to interpret what's on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites, and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing. The tool can "use computers in basically the same way that we do," Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview last month, adding it can do tasks with "tens or even hundreds of steps." 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. In September, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot's debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic's AI. In June, the company debuted its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May, it rolled out its "Team" plan for smaller businesses. 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.

Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic as part of AI, chip collaboration - SiliconANGLE

The announcement of the latest $4 billion cash infusion comes about a year after the cloud and retail giant disclosed its first $4 billion commitment to Anthropic. At the time, the OpenAI rival named Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. The deal announced today will see AWS take on the additional role of Anthropic's primary training provider. Anthropic introduced its most advanced large language model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, last month. It's an improved version of an identically-named LLM that debuted a few months earlier. The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet is better than its namesake at several tasks, including code generation, and outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o across multiple benchmark tests. Anthropic offers its LLMs through Amazon Bedrock, an AWS service that provides access to managed AI models. The companies' expanded partnership will give Bedrock users early access to a feature that makes it possible to fine-tune Claude models using customer-provided datasets. Increasing the amount of data available to an LLM often improves the quality of its output. Alongside the go-to-market collaboration, AWS and Anthropic plan to support one another's product development efforts. Anthropic will use the cloud giant's AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips, which are optimized for artificial intelligence training and inference, respectively, to power its internal workloads. The OpenAI rival detailed that it will leverage the former processor line to build its "largest foundation models." The latest Trainium chip, Trainium2, debuted last November. The processor boasts double the performance of its predecessor and twice the power efficiency. Customers can provision as many as 16 Trainium2 chips per instance, as well as combine instances into AI clusters with up to 100,000 chips and 65 exaflops of computing power. In parallel, Anthropic engineers will support AWS' efforts to develop new Trainium processors. The LLM developer will contribute to the software stack that powers the chip lineup. Neutron, as the software stack is called, includes a compiler that optimizes customers' AI models to run on Trainium instances and several other tools. Anthropic is working on "low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon," the company detailed in a blog post today. In some AI processors, a kernel is a code snippet that distributes computations across its host chip's cores as a way of boosting performance. Kernels are among the building blocks of advanced AI models. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies," said AWS Chief Executive Officer Matt Garman. Anthropic's latest funding round comes two months after OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in the largest startup investment on record. It also secured a $4 billion line of credit from a group of banks. OpenAI, which is now worth $157 billion, will invest the funds in AI research and compute infrastructure.

Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival

Amazon on Friday announced it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives. The new funding brings the tech giant's 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. Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic's "primary cloud and training partner," according to a blog post. From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models. Anthropic is the company behind Claude -- one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic, alongside tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are all part of a generative AI arms race to ensure they don't fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers "early access" to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic's Claude. It's "a customization benefit that AWS customers will uniquely enjoy for each model for a period of time on new Claude models," per a company blog post. In March, Amazon's $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company's largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September 2023. Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic's board. News of Amazon's 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. Anthropic's new Computer Use capability, part of its two newest AI models, allows its tech to interpret what's on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing. The tool can "use computers in basically the same way that we do," Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview last month, adding it can do tasks with "tens or even hundreds of steps." 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. In September, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot's debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic's AI. In June, the company debuted its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May, it rolled out its "Team" plan for smaller businesses.

Amazon Increases Total Investment in AI Startup Anthropic to $8 Billion | PYMNTS.com

Amazon and Anthropic announced an expanded partnership that includes Amazon investing another $4 billion in the artificial intelligence company and Anthropic making Amazon Web Services (AWS) its primary training partner. The new investment brings Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, Anthropic said in a Friday (Nov. 22) press release. "By combining Anthropic's expertise in frontier AI systems with AWS's world-class infrastructure, we're building a secure, enterprise-ready platform that gives organizations of all sizes access to the forefront of AI technology," Anthropic said in the release. The expanded partnership builds on one announced in September 2023 that included Amazon investing $4 billion in Anthropic and Anthropic making AWS its primary cloud partner, Amazon said in a Friday press release. In April, the companies added Anthropic's Claude family of AI models to Amazon Bedrock, AWS's fully managed service that provides secure access to foundation models. In their newly expanded partnership, the companies will give AWS customers early access to fine-tune their own data on new Anthropic models as they are released, per the Amazon release. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," AWS CEO Matt Garman said in the Amazon release. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies." Millions of end users and tens of thousands of customers -- including startups, enterprises and government institutions -- are using Anthropic's Claude in Amazon Bedrock, according to the Amazon release. The announcement came two days after the U.S. Department of Justice proposed to force Google to unwind its partnership with Anthropic as part of a proposal to resolve an antitrust case against Google. It also came three days after the United Kingdom's competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), cleared Google's partnership with Anthropic, saying the deal between the tech giant and the AI startup did not warrant additional investigation.

Amazon escalates AI arms race with additional $4B investment in...

Anthropic said Friday that longtime backer Amazon had pumped an additional $4 billion into the artificial intelligence startup, doubling its investment in the firm known for its GenAI chatbot Claude. Amazon will maintain its position as a minority investor and will be Anthropic's main training partner for AI models, the startup said. Amazon, which is Anthropic's primary cloud partner, is fiercely competing with Microsoft and Alphabet's Google to offer AI-powered tools for its cloud customers. The e-commerce company's increased investment in Anthropic underscores the billions of dollars funneled into AI startups over the past year, as investors look to capitalize on a boom in generative AI technology, which became popular with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022. Microsoft-backed OpenAI last month raised $6.6 billion from investors, which could value the company at $157 billion and cement its position as one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Anthropic plans to train and deploy its foundational models on Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips.The intensive process of training AI models requires powerful processors, making securing pricey AI chips a top priority for startups. Nvidia currently dominates the market for AI processors and counts Amazon among its long list of so-called hyperscaler customers. Still, Amazon has been working to develop its own chips through its Annapurna Labs division, which Anthropic said it was "working closely with" to aid in developing processors. Britain's competition regulator had said in September that Amazon's partnership with Anthropic would not be referred for a deeper probe as it did not fall under its jurisdiction. Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had also secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest another $1.5 billion over time. The startup also uses Alphabet's Google Cloud services as part of its operations.

Amazon Doubles Down Investment In Anthropic

Amazon has agreed to invest another $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic -- a ChatGPT rival with its AI assistant Claude. It was just last fall when Amazon agreed to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic -- giving the Seattle-based e-commerce and cloud titan a minority stake in Anthropic. The immediate investment was $1.25 billion, with the remaining $2.75 billion in funding coming earlier this year. That deal included Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services its primary cloud provider, as well as using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its models. This new investment means Amazon will have invested $8 billion into Anthropic, retaining its minority stake in the startup, per an Anthropic blog. "Together with AWS, we're laying the technological foundation -- from silicon to software -- that will power the next generation of AI research and development," reads the blog. "By combining Anthropic's expertise in frontier AI systems with AWS's world-class infrastructure, we're building a secure, enterprise-ready platform that gives organizations of all sizes access to the forefront of AI technology." Of course, Amazon is far from the only Big Tech firm to make big bets on AI startups. The big money deal with Amazon is actually only the second-biggest AI deal this week.

Amazon pumps another $4bn into AI start-up Anthropic

Amazon has invested another $4bn in artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the company to $8bn, as Big Tech's race to dominate the generative AI sector intensifies. Amazon invested an initial $1.25bn in September last year, and increased that to $4bn at the end of March. Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, said its AI software Claude had had "a year of breakout growth". "Our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers," he added. "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI model." Amazon is increasing its bet on Anthropic even as scrutiny from regulators in the US, UK and EU has grown over concerns that deals between Big Tech and the most prominent AI start-ups may pose competition risks.

Amazon boosts total Anthropic investment to $8B, deepens AI partnership with Claude maker

Amazon will invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot and AI platform, bringing its total investment to $8 billion under an expanded partnership between the companies. Even with the additional investment, the Seattle tech giant will remain a minority investor in Anthropic, the San Francisco company said in a post Friday morning. The move further positions the Amazon-Anthropic combination as a counterpart to the duo of Microsoft and OpenAI. The Redmond-based tech company has invested about $14 billion in the ChatGPT maker. "Anthropic is now naming AWS its primary training partner, in addition to continuing to be its primary cloud provider, and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models," Amazon said. "Both companies will continue to work closely to keep advancing Trainium's hardware and software capabilities."

Amazon invests another $4 bn in AI firm Anthropic

San Francisco (AFP) - Amazon is doubling its investment in Anthropic to $8 billion in a deepened collaboration on artificial intelligence, the companies said Friday. The e-commerce and technology behemoth will remain a minority investor in Anthropic, having pumped an initial $4 billion into the artificial intelligence developer late last year and becoming its primary cloud computing provider. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," said Matt Garman, chief of AWS cloud computing division. "We'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies." Amazon is investing the additional $4 billion in Anthropic as part of an expanded alliance that includes working together on "Trainium" hardware to optimize machine learning, according to the companies. "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology," said Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. The announcement came just days after Britain's competition regulator cleared Google-parent Alphabet's investment in Anthropic, following a probe. The Competition and Markets Authority concluded that the big tech giant had not acquired "material influence" over Anthropic as a result of the deal, which was reported to have cost $2 billion. The British regulator is one of several global regulators concerned with reining in big tech companies and their partnerships with AI firms. In September, the CMA cleared Amazon's initial investment in Anthropic, saying it did not believe that "a relevant merger situation has been created."

AWS Becomes Anthropic's Primary Cloud Partner with $4 Billion Investment

Anthropic is working with AWS's Annapurna Labs to develop next-gen Trainium hardware and improve the AWS Neuron software stack. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, making AWS the primary cloud provider and training partner for the company. This investment brings Amazon's total funding in Anthropic to $8 billion, maintaining a minority stake while deepening technical and commercial ties. To date, Anthropic has raised a total of $13.7 billion in venture capital, according to Crunchbase. The partnership will accelerate the development of Anthropic's advanced AI systems, including optimising AWS's Trainium accelerators for machine learning workloads. Anthropic and AWS's Annapurna Labs are collaborating on future generations of Trainium hardware, focusing on low-level kernel development and AWS Neuron software stack improvements. "Through deep technical collaboration, we're writing low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon, and contribute to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium," said Anthropic in its blog post. "Our engineers work closely with Annapurna's chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models," the company added This hardware-software integration is aimed at maximising computational efficiency to support Anthropic's foundation models. According to a recent report, Amazon is planning to roll out its latest AI chip, Trainium 2, in the coming month. It has been already tested by Anthropic, Databricks, and Deutsche Telekom. Trainium 2 is part of Amazon's larger strategy to optimise its data centre performance while reducing costs for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. Anthropic said its Claude models, accessible through Amazon Bedrock, have become essential for businesses like Pfizer, Intuit, and Perplexity. These companies use Claude for tasks such as streamlining medical research, simplifying tax calculations, and enhancing AI-powered search. The European Parliament uses Claude to efficiently analyse millions of documents. AWS's security features allow organizations to deploy Anthropic's AI models securely in environments such as AWS GovCloud and SageMaker for classified tasks. Government clients can access Claude's capabilities through regulated cloud services, ensuring compliance with stringent requirements. The company recently partnered with Palantir to provide its advanced AI model Claude to the US government for data analysis, and complex coding activities in projects of national security interest. Anthropic rival OpenAI recently raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion. The funding, led by existing investor Thrive Capital, has brought OpenAI's total capital raised to $17.9 billion, according to Crunchbase. Thrive Capital contributed approximately $1.3 billion, with the option to invest an additional $1 billion at the same valuation through 2025. Other major participants in this funding round include Microsoft, NVIDIA, SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, and MGX. Anthropic recently released an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and the new Claude 3.5 Haiku, along with a public beta for an experimental feature called "computer use." Over the last few months, it has also released several updates to its 3.5 series of Claude models, introducing impactful new features like Claude Artifacts, the Analysis tool, and Visual PDF. In the latest podcast episode with Lex Fridman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed that their Opus model isn't going anywhere, adding that Anthropic will release the much-anticipated update and launch Claude 3.5 Opus. He further said that Claude 4.0 will be released according to the usual business cycle.

Amazon doubles down on AI startup Anthropic with $4bn investment

Amazon's total investment in the AI company now totals $8bn, with its AWS unit as Anthropic's cloud provider Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic said on Friday it has raised an additional $4bn investment from longtime backer Amazon.com, bringing the e-commerce giant's total investment to $8bn, underscoring big tech's growing generative AI investments. Amazon will maintain its position as a minority investor, the company said. Its AWS unit will also be Anthropic's official cloud provider. Anthropic also said it is working with AWS's Annapurna Labs on the development of future generations of Amazon's Trainium chips and plans to train its foundational models on the hardware. Britain's competition regulator had said in September that Amazon's partnership with Anthropic will not be referred for a deeper inquiry as it did not fall under its jurisdiction. Anthropic, which was co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had also secured a $500m investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest another $1.5bn over time.

Amazon just threw another $4 billion at startup Anthropic, whose founder defected from OpenAI

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic as major technology companies rush to fund generative AI. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic - which began last year - to $8 billion. Anthropic said the Seattle-based tech giant will maintain its position as a minority investor in the startup, which was founded by former leaders of the Microsoft-linked OpenAI. Under the deal, Amazon said the San Francisco-based Anthropic will now name Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, as its "primary training partner." It will also use two AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundational models, the advanced systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in a statement included in Amazon's announcement. The relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups has received scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and abroad. However, Amazon got some good news in September when Britain's competition watchdog said Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules.

Amazon Strengthens Anthropic Partnership with $8 Billion AI Investment - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Anthropic designates AWS as its training partner, advancing next-gen foundation models with Trainium chips. On Friday, Amazon.Com Inc AMZN and Anthropic announced an expansion of their strategic partnership, strengthening their collaboration on artificial intelligence advancements. Anthropic raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon. This deepened alliance builds on Amazon's $4 billion investment in Anthropic last year, which positioned Amazon Web Services (AWS) as Anthropic's primary cloud provider. Also Read: Microsoft's Brad Smith Urges Trump Government to Tackle Growing Cyber Threats OpenAI rival Anthropic has now designated AWS as its primary training partner, utilizing AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to develop and deploy its next-generation foundation models. Amazon's latest cash investment increased its total funding in Anthropic to $8 billion, while Anthropic confirmed that Amazon remains a minority investor. So far, Anthropic has secured $13.7 billion in venture capital funding, TechCrunch cites Crunchbase. Both companies are committed to advancing Trainium's hardware and software capabilities, ensuring optimized performance, security, and privacy for customers leveraging Amazon Bedrock's Claude models. As part of the expanded collaboration, AWS customers will gain early access to fine-tune Anthropic models with their data, offering unique customization capabilities for the new Claude model family. This exclusive feature aligns with Amazon's focus on delivering cutting-edge generative AI solutions through its Bedrock platform. Amazon Bedrock introduced Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku and an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, showcasing their most advanced AI capabilities. Claude 3.5 Sonnet now includes enhanced agentic features like computer use, outperforming other publicly available models in Anthropic's tests. These innovations continue to drive enterprises such as HackerOne, HUDstats, and Sapio Sciences to adopt anthropopic models. Matt Garman, AWS CEO, praised the collaboration, stating, "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating on Trainium chips, we'll push the boundaries of generative AI technologies." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei emphasized the partnership's impact, noting, "Our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users." The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) scrutinized Amazon and Anthropic's partnership following the Federal Trade Commission's inquiry into Amazon's $4 billion investment in September 2023. In September 2024, the CMA approved the partnership. The regulator is examining whether the partnership resembles a merger and whether it could lead to anti-competitive practices within the artificial intelligence sector. U.K. regulators are also investigating Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google's $2 billion investment in Anthropic for potential competition concerns. Price Action: AMZN stock is down 0.12% at $198.15 at the last check on Friday. Also Read: Alibaba Reshapes E-Commerce Operations, Names Jiang Fan as Unit CEO Photo courtesy: Shutterstock This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

AWS, Amazon CEOs On 'Remarkable' New $4 Billion Anthropic Investment And Partnership

'About a year ago, AWS became Anthropic's primary cloud partner -- which you can also see by the substantial momentum of Anthropic on Amazon Bedrock. Today, we become Anthropic's primary foundation model training partner,' says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. The tech giant previously invested $4 billion in Anthropic over the past year, pushing Amazon's overall investment in OpenAI's main rival to $8 billion. Both Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and AWS CEO Matt Garman weighed in on the company's new bullish $4 billion investment in Anthropic on Friday. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," said Garman in a statement. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies." [Related: The 10 Coolest GenAI Products And AI Tools Of 2024] Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who was previously AWS CEO, said he was excited about "deepening" his company's partnership with the AI superstar startup. "About a year ago, AWS became Anthropic's primary cloud partner -- which you can also see by the substantial momentum of Anthropic on Amazon Bedrock. Today, we become Anthropic's primary foundation model training partner," said Jassy. Amazon's CEO said Anthropic is excited about the "price-performance advantage that Trainium" offers. "We're grateful for this confidence and partnership. Early days for what's to come," said Jassy. The $110 billion Seattle-based cloud giant currently owns 31 percent share of the global enterprise cloud infrastructure services market. With the new $4 billion investment, Anthropic plans to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models. Both companies said they will continue to work closely to keep advancing Trainium's hardware and software capabilities. This next partnership phase aims to further enhance the performance, security, and privacy that Amazon Bedrock provides for customers running Claude models. Additionally, Anthropic and AWS have collaborated to give AWS customers early access to the ability to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic models. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration," said Garman. Anthropic CEO: A Year 'Of Breakout Growth For Claude' Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said it's been "a year of breakout growth for Claude." Anthropic said it set new benchmarks for large language model (LLM) performance throughout 2024, as demonstrated by the Claude 3 and Claude 3.5 model families which are both available in Amazon Bedrock. Claude 3.5 Sonnet was recently upgraded with advanced agentic capabilities including computer use. The AI startup said Claude 3.5 Sonnet now outperforms all publicly available models on agentic coding tasks. "Our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock," said Amodei in a statement. "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology."

Amazon plows another $4 billion into Anthropic

You just gonna stand there, Google, let AWS take the 'primary training partner' title? Not gonna do nothing? Amid concerns about the return of AI winter, when funding and advancements slow down, neural-network golden child Anthropic reports the doubling of Amazon's already substantial financial backing. It was only back in March that Amazon finished shoveling $4 billion into Anthropic, maker of the Claude family of generative models. Now comes word of another $4 billion, bringing the e-commerce and cloud giant's total investment to - check the math - $8 billion. In the face of so much cash - no cloud credits were involved, Amazon told us previously - Anthropic has declared Amazon Web Services to be its "primary cloud and training partner." That represents an expansion of the previously declared relationship in which AWS was described only as the "primary cloud partner." Presumably Google, which committed to investing a mere $2 billion in Anthropic last year, must accept some lesser form of relationship. Tie-ups like these piqued the interest of the US Federal Trade Commission in January, based on concerns that deals between tech giants and AI firms may limit competition. The watchdog agency hasn't announced any action since then beyond issuing a joint statement in July with EU and UK regulators about the need to promote competition among AI firms. So far, nothing has come of the regulatory concern. In August, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation into Amazon's arrangement with Anthropic. A month later, the competition watchdog dropped its investigation. In October, the CMA began sniffing around Google's investment in Anthropic. Anthropic says it expects to work with Annapurna Labs at AWS to develop and refine AWS' Trainium accelerators, which help speed up machine learning workloads. "Through deep technical collaboration, we're writing low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon, and contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium," Anthropic said. "Our engineers work closely with Annapurna's chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models." Part of the rationale for the deal is that business customers - as opposed to more reticent consumers - appear to be enthusiastic about AI services. Anthropic notes that Pfizer is using Claude models in the model management service Amazon Bedrock to accelerate medical research and reduce operational costs. Other customers include Intuit, Perplexity, and the European Parliament, which is said to use Claude in its Archibot document search and analysis service. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a statement. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies." ®

Amazon Investing an Additional $4 Billion in AI Firm Anthropic

Amazon.com Inc. is boosting its stake in OpenAI rival Anthropic, builder of the Claude generative artificial intelligence software. The cloud-computing giant is pumping an additional $4 billion into the San Francisco startup, Amazon said in a statement on Friday.

Amazon Invests $4 Billion in Anthropic, Deepening Its A.I. Ties

Amazon said on Friday that it would invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, a start-up that competes with OpenAI and Google in the increasingly competitive field of artificial intelligence. Over the past 14 months, Amazon has poured $8 billion into Anthropic, a sign of the urgency the tech giant feels to keep pace with its rivals in developing new A.I. tools that are reshaping the tech sector. Money continues to flow into the biggest A.I. start-ups. Elon Musk's xAI is in talks to raise new financing that could value the company at about $40 billion. In October, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion, bringing the company's value to $157 billion. "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative A.I., and look forward to deepening our collaboration," Matt Garman, the chief executive of Amazon's cloud computing division, AWS, said in a blog post announcing the deal. The fund-raising comes despite questions among some investors over whether the young, unprofitable companies will be able to develop businesses robust enough to justify their lofty valuations. The concerns are creating winners and losers. While Anthropic and OpenAI continue to raise significant sums, some smaller companies have essentially been folded into Google and Microsoft. (In December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, claiming they used millions of articles published by The Times to build chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. Both companies have denied the claims.) U.S. regulators are also scrutinizing the multibillion-dollar investments that Microsoft, Amazon and Google are putting into A.I. start-ups, which need the money because of the eye-popping sums required to develop cutting-edge A.I. models. But the deals are seen as allowing the big companies to form deep ties with their smaller rivals while avoiding most government scrutiny. Like OpenAI, Anthropic is a developer of so-called generative A.I., the technology capable of learning from vast amounts of data to create humanlike text and images. These tools are being used to create chatbots, including Anthropic's Claude, but are also seen as having the potential to automate many tasks and reshape aspects of the global economy. Anthropic has tried to position itself as one of the more responsible actors in the field of A.I. The company's executives have warned that the technology could pose an existential risk if not developed carefully. As part of its relationship with Amazon, Anthropic is a customer of the company's data centers, cloud-computing platform and semiconductors. That means Anthropic, based in San Francisco, will put some of its resources back into Amazon as it pays for computer servers and other services from the Seattle-based tech giant. The arrangement provides a boost for Amazon as it tries to gain ground on Nvidia, the market leader in selling A.I. chips.

Amazon pours another $4B into Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival

On Friday, Anthropic announced that Amazon has increased its investment in the AI startup by $4 billion, bringing its total stake to $8 billion while maintaining its minority investor position. Anthropic makes Claude, an AI assistant rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT. One reason behind the deal involves chips. The computing demands of training large AI models have made access to specialized processors a requirement for AI companies. While Nvidia currently dominates the AI chip market with customers that include most major tech companies, some cloud providers like Amazon have begun developing their own AI-specific processors. Under the agreement, Anthropic will train and deploy its foundation models using Amazon's custom-built Trainium (for training AI models) and its Inferentia chips (for AI inference, the term for running trained models). The company will also work with Amazon's Annapurna Labs division to advance processor development for AI applications. Reportedly, Anthropic has also been assisting Amazon with developing a new version of its Alexa AI assistant since August based on Anthropic's Claude AI language model. However, snags with security issues and latency have delayed the launch.

Anthropic raises an additional $4B from Amazon, makes AWS its 'primary' training partner

Anthropic, OpenAI's close rival, has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon, and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing division, the primary place it'll train its flagship generative AI models. Anthropic also says it's working with Annapurna Labs, AWS' chipmaking division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS' custom-built chips for training AI models. "Our engineers work closely with Annapurna's chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models," Anthropic wrote in a blog post. "Together with AWS, we're laying the technological foundation -- from silicon to software -- that will power the next generation of AI research and development." The new cash infusion from Amazon brings the tech giant's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, but maintains Amazon's position as a minority investor, Anthropic says. To date, Anthropic has raised $13.7 billion in venture capital, according to Crunchbase. The Information reported earlier this month that Amazon was in talks to invest multiple billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge in the company since a $4 billion deal struck last year. The new investment is reportedly structured similar to the last one -- but with a twist. Amazon insisted that Anthropic use Amazon-developed silicon hosted on AWS to train its AI. Anthropic is said to prefer Nvidia chips. But the money may have been too good to pass up. Around the start of the year, Anthropic reportedly projected it would burn through over $2.7 billion in 2024 as it trained and scaled up its AI products. Anthropic has for several months been discussing new funding at a $40 billion valuation, per The Information, and no doubt the pressure was on to clinch something soon. Anthropic notes that its work with AWS has expanded over the years. Through Amazon Bedrock, AWS' platform for hosting and fine-tuning models, Anthropic's Claude family of models are being used by "tens of thousands" of companies, Anthropic says. Recently, Anthropic teamed up with AWS and Palantir to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Claude. Beyond AWS, Amazon is said to be working with Anthropic to revamp the former's consumer products. Reportedly, Amazon is set to replace the in-house models powering Alexa, its virtual assistant, with Anthropic's after encountering technical challenges. The collaboration -- and investments -- have attracted regulator scrutiny. The FTC earlier this year sent a letter to Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Google, requiring the companies to explain the impacts their investments in startups such as Anthropic have on the competitive landscape of generative AI. Google has also invested in Anthropic, having poured $2 billion in the company late last October and taken a 10% stake in the company, while Microsoft is a major OpenAI backer. The U.K.'s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, which has also opened several inquiries into big tech tie-ups with AI upstarts, recently okayed Alphabet's partnership and investment Anthropic after giving Amazon's investment last year the green light. Anthropic continues to maintain pace with the other frontier AI labs, including OpenAI, releasing new capabilities like Computer Use, which lets its current best model perform tasks on a PC autonomously. But the company has faced its share of setbacks, as well. It unexpectedly hiked the price of one of its models recently. And it's seen the timetable slip for the release of its next-generation, top-of-the-line Claude model, 3.5 Opus.

Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, positioning itself as a key player in the AI arms race

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More The artificial intelligence arms race heated up Friday as Amazon announced an additional $4 billion investment in Anthropic, doubling its stake to $8 billion in a move that signals the cloud computing giant's ambitious bid to compete with Microsoft and Google in the fast-evolving AI landscape. The deal, which maintains Amazon as a minority investor, establishes AWS as Anthropic's primary cloud and training partner. Most significantly, it commits Anthropic to using Amazon's custom-designed Trainium and Inferentia chips for training and deploying its advanced AI models -- a major win for Amazon's semiconductor strategy. Amazon's calculated investment positions the company at the center of AI infrastructure development. While Microsoft has captured headlines and market momentum through its OpenAI partnership, Amazon is taking a different approach by building a comprehensive AI stack from silicon to software. The commitment to use AWS Trainium chips is particularly notable, as it gives Amazon's custom silicon program the kind of high-profile validation it needs to compete with Nvidia's dominance in AI acceleration. How Amazon plans to challenge Microsoft's AI dominance The expanded partnership has already shown promising results. According to Anthropic, tens of thousands of customers are using its Claude models through Amazon Bedrock, including major enterprises like Pfizer, which reported tens of millions in operational cost savings. The European Parliament has also adopted Claude to power a document analysis system that processes 2.1 million official documents. The timing of this deal aligns with a crucial shift in enterprise AI adoption. As companies move from AI experimentation to production deployment, they're increasingly focused on security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. By integrating Anthropic's technology directly into the AWS ecosystem, Amazon is positioning itself to capture this next wave of enterprise AI adoption. Inside the battle for AI cloud supremacy This move significantly reshapes the competitive dynamics in cloud AI services. While Microsoft's OpenAI partnership gave it an early lead in the generative AI race, Amazon's deeper integration with Anthropic could prove more sustainable in the long run. The focus on custom silicon and tight hardware-software integration mirrors the successful playbook Apple used in personal computing -- but at cloud scale. The deal also creates an interesting dynamic with Google, which invested $2 billion in Anthropic last year. With both tech giants now holding significant stakes, Anthropic has effectively positioned itself as a Switzerland of sorts in the AI wars, maintaining independence while leveraging the resources of multiple tech giants. What Amazon's AI investment means for enterprise technology For enterprise customers, this partnership addresses several critical concerns. First, it promises more cost-effective AI deployment through optimization for AWS's custom chips. Second, it provides a clear path to scale AI applications through Amazon's global infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, it offers a more secure and compliant way to adopt advanced AI capabilities. Anthropic's latest Computer Use feature, which allows AI to operate computers like humans, will be available first to AWS customers. This exclusivity period could give Amazon's enterprise customers a significant head start in automating complex workflows. The future of cloud computing: AI takes center stage The real significance of this deal lies in its long-term implications for the cloud computing industry. As AI becomes increasingly central to enterprise operations, the ability to offer optimized, integrated AI services could become the key differentiator in the cloud market. Amazon's investment suggests a belief that the future of cloud computing will be built on AI infrastructure. The deal also reflects a broader industry trend toward vertical integration in AI, with major players seeking to control every layer of the stack from chips to applications. This could lead to a more concentrated market structure, with a few large players dominating the AI infrastructure landscape. As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, this partnership could prove pivotal in determining which technology giants emerge as the dominant forces in the AI era. With the generative AI market projected to exceed $1 trillion within the decade, Amazon's expanded investment in Anthropic represents a strategic bet on shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

Amazon to invest another $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic

Amazon announced today that it's pumping another $4 billion into Claude AI maker Anthropic, bringing its total funding amount to $8 billion. This latest round follows $1.25 billion last September and another $2.75 billion in March. Along with the money, Amazon wrote in its blog post that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be named Anthropic's "primary training partner" and that the OpenAI rival would use Trainium and Inferentia chips for future models. The investment and deeper partnership align with previous reporting by Reuters that Claude will power Amazon's new Alexa voice assistant. The improved Alexa -- the release of which has been delayed -- reportedly performed better with Claude than it did when using Amazon's in-house model. The release of the revamped Alexa feature is now slated for 2025. Amazon is at risk of falling further behind in the AI arms race compared to competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI. In the new version of Alexa, Amazon promised a more conversational tone, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT voice mode -- but some beta users reported slow, stilted, and unhelpful responses. It also apparently has trouble turning on the lights.

Anthropic raises an additional $4B from Amazon, makes AWS is 'primary' cloud partner | TechCrunch

Anthropic, OpenAI's close rival, has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon, and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing division, the primary place it'll train its flagship generative AI models. Anthropic also says it's working with Annapurna Labs, AWS' chipmaking division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS' custom-built chips for training AI models. "Our engineers work closely with Annapurna's chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models," Anthropic wrote in a blog post. "Together with AWS, we're laying the technological foundation -- from silicon to software -- that will power the next generation of AI research and development." The new infusion from Amazon brings the company's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, but maintains Amazon's position as a minority investor, Anthropic says. To date, Anthropic has raised $13.7 billion in venture capital, according to Crunchbase data. The Information reported earlier this month that Amazon was in talks to invest multiple billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge in the company since a deal struck last year. The new investment is reportedly structured similar to the last one -- but with a twist. Amazon insisted that Anthropic use Amazon-developed silicon hosted on AWS to train its AI. Anthropic is said to prefer Nvidia chips. But the money may have been too good to pass up. Around the start of the year, Anthropic reportedly projected it would burn through over $2.7 billion in 2024 as it trained and scaled up its AI products. Anthropic has for several months been discussing new funding at a $40 billion valuation, per The Information, and no doubt the pressure was on to clinch something soon. Anthropic notes that its work with AWS has expanded over the years. Through Amazon Bedrock, AWS' platform for hosting and fine-tuning models, Anthropic's Claude family of models are being used by "tens of thousands" of companies, Anthropic says in the blog post. Recently, Anthropic teamed up with AWS and Palantir to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Claude. Beyond AWS, Amazon is said to be working with Anthropic to beef up the former's consumer products. Reportedly, Amazon is set to replace the in-house models powering Alexa, its AI assistant, with Anthropic's after encountering technical challenges. Anthropic continues to maintain pace with the other frontier AI labs, including OpenAI, releasing new capabilities like Computer Use, which lets its current best model perform tasks on a PC autonomously. But the company has faced its share of setbacks, as well. It unexpectedly hiked the price of one of its models recently. And it's seen the timetable slip for the release of its next-generation, top-of-the-line Claude model, 3.5 Opus.

Amazon Doubles Down On Anthropic Investment, Mirroring Microsoft's OpenAI Strategy

Amazon (AMZN) is doubling down on its partnership with Anthropic, one of the primary rivals to OpenAI. Amazon's cloud unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), today (Nov. 22) announced that it will invest an additional $4 billion into the A.I. startup in an expanded deal that will see Anthropic use AWS chips to train and deploy future A.I. models. The move brings Amazon's total investments in Anthropic to $8 billion, strengthening the ties between the two companies and deepening their competitive standing against other powerhouse A.I. partnerships like that of Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters AWS has backed Anthropic since last September when it invested an initial $1.25 billion into the company. Followed by another $2.75 billion this March that represented the largest external investment in Amazon's history, the partnership positioned AWS as Anthropic's primary cloud provider. Under the new investment, Amazon is set to become Anthropic's "primary training partner," according to the companies, and will see its Trainium and Inferentia chips used to develop Anthropic's Claude family of A.I. models. As part of their tie-up, AWS and Anthropic said Claude will continue to be deployed across AWS's Bedrock platform, where the models are already used by companies like Pfizer (PFE), Intuit, Perplexity AI and the European Union. "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced A.I. models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology," said Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, in a statement. Anthropic's primary product is its Claude chatbot, a direct competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Co-founded by former OpenAI employees in 2020, the San Francisco, Calif.-based company has recently poached a number of top OpenAI leaders and lauds its products as a safety-focused alternative to OpenAI's GPT. The fast-growing startup is reportedly in talks for a new fundraising round that would value the startup at between $30 billion and $40 billion, doubling the $15 billion valuation it received earlier this year. How does the bolstered partnership stack up against Microsoft and OpenAI's tie-up? Amazon's ambitious bet on Anthropic parallels a strategy pioneered by Microsoft in 2019, when it first invested in OpenAI. The investment has since grown into a $13 billion partnership. OpenAI's GPT models are integrated into various Microsoft products, and, in turn, Microsoft provides OpenAI with additional computing power with Azure acting as the A.I. company's exclusive cloud provider. The sustainability of such A.I. partnerships, however, is unclear as regulatory scrutiny continues to build around tech leaders. Anthropic and Amazon earlier this year faced a probe from the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that examined whether their partnership constituted a de facto merger. While the investigation was later cleared, the regulatory body is currently inquiring into whether Anthropic's connections to Google (GOOGL), which invested $2 billion into the A.I. startup last year, represents an antitrust threat. OpenAI and Microsoft, too, have been subject to similar investigations from the CMA and an additional review from the European Commission. Their relationship is also reportedly the subject of an antitrust investigation from the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S., which in January set a broader antitrust examination into motion when it requested information from Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic and Google on their respective arrangements.

$4 billion more: Amazon deepens its bet on generative AI with Anthropic

Competition among generative AI companies is heating up. On Friday, Amazon announced it would invest another $4 billion in the generative AI company, Anthropic. In little more than a year, the tech giant has now dumped at least $8 billion into the brand. Anthropic is a competitor of OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion from investors last month. It also rivals Google and Elon Musk's xAI. In a blog post announcing the deal, Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon's cloud computing division, AWS, said, "We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration." Garman added that the companies will "keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies." Amazon also said that AWS will be named "primary training partner." That boundary-pushing could look like more innovations coming to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Anthropic's new AI model. The chatbot was first released in 2023, as a competitor to ChatGPT. Last month, the company announced it gave Claude the ability to control a user's computer and access the internet -- a big leap for AI, which other companies are likely to imitate.

Amazon Boosts Stake in A.I. Company Anthropic by $4 Billion

Amazon.com said it will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, deepening its ties with the company and enlarging its artificial-intelligence footprint. The decision builds off of a strategic collaboration announced in September of last year which included an initial $1.25 billion investment and Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services its primary cloud provider. Amazon has since invested a total of $4 billion in Anthropic. On Friday, Amazon said it will be Anthropic's primary training partner as well as its primary cloud provider. Write to Adriano Marchese at adriano.marchese@wsj.com

Amazon invests an additional $6.2b in AI firm Anthropic

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Amazon is investing an additional $US4 billion ($6.2 billion) in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, boosting its stake in one of OpenAI's chief rivals. The new infusion, announced by the companies on Friday (Saturday AEDT), follows a $US4 billion investment in Anthropic completed earlier this year. That deal included provisions that Anthropic use Amazon Web Services data centres for some of its computing needs, as well as AWS-designed AI chips. Anthropic also has close ties with Alphabet's Google.

Amazon to Invest Another $4 Billion in Anthropic

Amazon is investing another $4 billion into Anthropic, bringing the total it's invested in the artificial intelligence startup to $8 billion, the companies said Friday. Anthropic has also agreed to use Amazon chips to train its AI. Amazon will become Anthropic's "primary training partner," according to Anthropic, though it will still be a minority shareholder. The Information reported earlier

Anthropic will use AWS AI chips after $4 billion Amazon investment

Amazon's in-house chips will take cycles from NVIDIA's ubiquitous silicon. Amazon is doubling its investment in Anthropic. The e-commerce giant will provide Anthropic with an additional $4 billion in funding on top of the $4 billion it committed last year. Although Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) its "primary cloud and training partner." Before today's announcement, The Information had that Amazon wanted to make any additional funding contingent on a commitment from Anthropic to use the company's in-house AI chips instead of silicon from NVIDIA. It appears Amazon got its way, with both companies noting in separate press releases that Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train future foundation models. Additionally, Anthropic says it will collaborate with Amazon's Annapurna Labs to develop future Trainium accelerators. "Through deep technical collaboration, we're writing low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon, and contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium," the company said. "Our engineers work closely with Annapurna's chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models." According to another , Anthropic expects to burn through more than $2.7 billion before the end. Before today, the company had raised $9.7 billion. Either way, it's bought itself some much-needed runway as it looks to compete against OpenAI and other companies in the AI space.

Amazon Invests Another $4B In AI Firm Anthropic

CNN Renews Comedy Series 'Have I Got News For You' For Second Season Amazon is investing another $4 billion into the generative artificial intelligence firm Anthropic as it continues to pour resources into AI tech. The tech giant, which also owns Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said Friday that the deal will see Anthropic make Amazon's AWS division "its primary training partner and will use AWS Trainium to train and deploy its largest foundation models." The investment will also give AWS customers some benefits, including the ability to fine-tune their data, "a customization benefit that AWS customers will uniquely enjoy for each model for a period of time on new Claude models," the company says. Anthropic is the company behind Claude, one of the most widely-used AI models on the market, alongside the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Llama. Amazon had previously invested $2.75 billion in Anthropic just six months ago. The companies also listed a slew of customers using Anthropic models in conjunction with AWS, including the PGA Tour, Perplexity, T-Mobile, and many others. The rise of generative AI is not without controversy, as tech companies have launched a lobbying effort meant to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train AI models. Anthropic itself is facing a lawsuit from authors who argued that the company "usurped a licensing market for copyright owners" by downloading the works without seeking to compensate the authors. And Amazon has been rapidly rolling out AI-powered products as well. In the video space, it recently launched AI-generated recaps on Prime Video. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," said Matt Garman, AWS CEO. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We've been impressed by Anthropic's pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration." "This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock," said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology."