Amazon is investing another $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company that rivals OpenAI and is led by several of its former employees, the company announced Friday. The $4 billion investment brings Amazon’s total stake in Anthropic to $8 billion, as it battles other major tech giants like Microsoft in the budding AI sector.
As part of the new deal, Amazon said in a blog post that Anthropic would use Amazon Web Services as its “primary training partner.” The deepening relationship between the two companies comes a few months after Reuters reported Anthropic’s Claude chatbot will serve as the backbone to Amazon’s Alexa update, which is expected to release in 2025. Anthropic will also use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips moving forward as part of the new investment, Amazon said in a blog post.
Amazon first put $1.25 billion into San Francisco-based Anthropic in September 2023, and followed that up with another $2.75 billion earlier this year. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said he was “excited” about the expanded partnership in a post on X, adding his company would become the “primary foundation model training partner” for Anthropic.
One interesting section of Amazon’s blog post said it would give its Amazon Web Services customers “early access to the ability to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic models, a customization benefit that AWS customers will uniquely enjoy for each model for a period of time on new Claude models.”
Anthropic’s Claude is the company’s answer to other major models and chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Gemini from Google. The company was founded in 2021 by OpenAI’s former VP of research Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela, who was OpenAI’s VP of safety and policy. Several other OpenAI employees also came aboard when Anthropic started.
“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, Anthropic’s CEO, 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.”
