Amazon will invest up to $4 billion and take a minority stake in Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company founded two years ago by former OpenAI executives and considered one of the world’s top AI labs.
Anthropic makes large-scale AI models and a chatbot called Claude. The company’s founders split from OpenAI after becoming concerned that the ChatGPT maker was becoming too commercial. Its founders include siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, who led OpenAI’s engineering and policy/safety teams, respectively.
The investment and expanded partnership includes a commitment by Anthropic to make Amazon Web Services its main cloud provider. Specific terms of the investment and the size of Amazon’s stake were not disclosed.
Were it an outright acquisition, the Anthropic deal at maximum value would rank among the top four in Amazon’s history, behind its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017 and its $8.5 billion purchase of Hollywood studio MGM in 2022, and comparable to its $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical this year.
News of the investment comes less than eight months after Anthropic declared its allegiance to Google Cloud, the AWS rival that reportedly invested $300 million in Anthropic for a 10% stake as part of a prior funding round.
- Amazon “will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development,” the Seattle company said in a post announcing the deal.
- The companies said Anthropic will build, train, and deploy its AI models on AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.
- The startup will also expand its support for Amazon Bedrock, the AWS service that provides access to AI foundation models for cloud customers to use in building their own apps and services.
Amazon has been scrambling to demonstrate momentum in generative artificial intelligence in AWS and across its business in recent months, seeking to counter the perception that it has fallen behind in the AI technology race.
The investment in Anthropic “signals a newfound urgency in Amazon’s strategy to further integrate generative AI into its AWS suite of services,” Wedbush analyst Scott Devitt wrote in a note Monday.
Amazon’s investment in Anthropic echoes Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI. That partnership has given the Redmond company new momentum in deploying AI in its own products and for its cloud customers.
“Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance existing applications, and create net-new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses,” Amazon said in its post.
In its own post, Anthropic cited its own need for scarce computing horsepower.
“Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including compute power and research programs,” the company said in the post. “Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research.”
