Amazon is spending billions more to back an artificial intelligence startup as it looks for an edge in the new technology arms race. It would spend another $2.75 billion backing Anthropic, adding to its initial $1.25 billion check.
Amazonis making its largest outside investment in its three-decade history as it looks to gain an edge in theartificial intelligencerace.
The tech giant said it will spend another $2.75 billion backingAnthropic, a San Francisco-based startup that’s widely viewed as a front-runner in generative artificial intelligence. Its foundation model and chatbot Claude competes withOpenAIand ChatGPT.
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The companies announced aninitial $1.25 billion investmentin September, and said at the time that Amazon would invest up to $4 billion. Wednesday’s news marks Amazon’s second tranche of that funding.
Amazon will maintain a minority stake in the company and won’t have an Anthropic board seat, the company said. The deal was struck at the AI startup’s last valuation,which was $18.4 billion.
Over the past year, Anthropic closed five different funding deals worth about $7.3 billion. The company’s product directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds, and it was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives and employees.
News of the Amazon investment comes weeks after Anthropicdebuted Claude 3, its newest suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet. The company said the most capable of its new models outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 andGoogle’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate level knowledge, graduate level reasoning and basic mathematics.
“Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS cloud provider.
