Amazon doubles investment in AI firm Anthropic to $8 billion

Amazon has announced a further $4 billion investment in artificial intelligence company Anthropic, doubling its total investment in the Claude chatbot maker to $8 billion.

The latest investment, which will be delivered in phases starting with $1.3 billion, comes in the form of convertible notes. Amazon will remain a minority investor in the company, Anthropic confirmed on Friday.

The expanded partnership sees Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary training partner, building upon AWS’s existing role as the company’s primary cloud provider. Anthropic will use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models.

Matt Garman, Amazon Web Services chief executive officer, said: “The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable. By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies.”

The investment highlights the fierce competition between tech giants to dominate the AI market. Microsoft has backed OpenAI with significant investment, while Google’s parent company Alphabet previously invested $500 million in Anthropic with a promise of an additional $1.5 billion over time.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, noted: “This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock.”

The partnership will also allow AWS customers early access to fine-tuning capabilities with their own data on Anthropic models, a feature that will be uniquely available to AWS customers for a period of time on new Claude models.