Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, commits $4 billion to AI startup Anthropic.
This strategic move targets competition with tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia in the AI arena.
In a recent announcement, Amazon revealed its intention to leverage Anthropic’s AI technology across its products and services. Additionally, Anthropic will rely on Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider and contribute to the development of Amazon’s custom AI chips.
As part of this partnership, Amazon will secure a “minority ownership position” in Anthropic, although specific details remain undisclosed.
According to Wall Street, initial investment from Amazon stands at an estimated $1.25 billion. Anthropic, considered a prominent rival to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, achieved a valuation of approximately $5 billion in its recent fundraising round, with support from Google.
What you should know
Notably, Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI staffers Dario and Daniela Amodei, offers its AI assistant named Claude, a counterpart to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Claude is distinguished by its adherence to a set of inherent ethical principles, serving as its “constitution.”
While Amazon aims to compete with Microsoft, Google, and Meta in the AI sector, it remains uncertain whether Anthropic’s AI technology will integrate into Amazon’s upgraded digital assistant, Alexa, powered by generative AI.
In 2022, Google invested $300 million in Anthropic, designating Google Cloud as the startup’s “preferred cloud provider” and announcing collaborative efforts to “co-develop AI computing systems.”
The impact of Amazon’s recent investment and Anthropic’s choice of AWS as its “primary cloud provider” on these plans remains unclear. While details are sketchy, Amodei stated nothing has changed in their arrangement with Google.
In a previous development this year, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, gaining a 49% stake and integrating OpenAI’s language models into various Microsoft products and services, including Bing search, Office, and Windows.
