Amazon invests $5 billion in Anthropic to compete with Microsoft's OpenAI investments

Early this year, Microsoft and OpenAI announced that they're extending their partnership with "a multiyear, multibillion-dollar" investment. Microsoft didn't say exactly how much money it's investing in OpenAI, but previous claims have put it at around $10 billion.

Today, Amazon has invested $4 billion in AI safety startup Anthropic as part of a new partnership. Under the deal, Amazon will initially take a minority stake in Anthropic for $1.25 billion, with an option to increase its total investment to $4 billion.

Anthropic is an AI research firm known for its conversational AI model, Claude. The startup had previously raised $2.7 billion from investors, including Google and Spark Capital. With Amazon's investment, Anthropic now has substantial funding to develop more advanced AI models further.

As part of the partnership, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads like safety research and model building. Anthropic will leverage AWS services like Trainium accelerator chips for AI training and Inferentia chips for deployment. The companies said this infrastructure will allow Anthropic to scale its technology responsibly. AWS users will have access to Anthropic's models through its managed service, Amazon Bedrock.

AWS will become Anthropic's primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment.

Amazon believes the partnership will improve customer experiences through expanded AI capabilities. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, said customers are excited about new services like Amazon Bedrock and the collaboration should provide even more value.

Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS's new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS's AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.

Meanwhile, in July, four leading AI technology companies, including Microsoft and Anthropic, joined forces to form the Frontier Model Forum. The group's goal is to ensure the "safe and responsible development" of generative AI.