Amazon announces $4B investment in AI company Anthropic

Sept. 25 (UPI) -- Amazon said on Monday it will pay up to $4 billion for a minority stake in the artificial intelligence company Anthropic and have a minority ownership position in the company to collaborate on excelling development of the technology.

Under the deal, Amazon said it will use Amazon Web Services cloud computing platforms to support Anthropic's development.

"We have tremendous respect for Anthropic's team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said.

Amazon said the "strategic collaboration" will allow Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models while also collaborating to further develop Trainium and Inferentia technology.

Anthropic will also provide AAWS users with early access to "unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities."

"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," Jassy said.

In turn, AWS will become Anthropic's primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.

Anthropic has been an AWS customer since 2021 and has become one of the world's leading foundation model providers and a leading advocate for the responsible deployment of generative AI. Their foundation model, Claude, excels at a wide range of tasks, from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction."

"We are excited to use AWS's Trainium chips to develop future foundation models," said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. "Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers.

"By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic's safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS's leading cloud technology."

The announcement is Amazon's latest multi-billion dollar purchase this year. In February, Amazon confirmed it has closed a $3.9 billion deal to acquire membership-based primary care provider One Medical, a San Francisco-based outlet.