Amazon Invests $4 Billion in AI Startup Anthropic

Amazon and the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic have announced a new investment agreement to support the research and development of new high-performance foundation models.

Anthropic disclosed in a post on X (previously Twitter) that Amazon will invest $4 billion in its work and provide access to Amazon Web Services Trainium and Inferentia chips.

In exchange, Anthropic will provide “enhanced support” for Amazon Bedrock, which generates foundation models, as well as “secure model customization and fine-tuning” for businesses.

Amazon teams will also be able to use Bedrock to construct models from Anthropic. Additionally, Amazon is reportedly acquiring a “minority stake” in Anthropic through this transaction.

“As outlined in this policy, we will conduct pre-deployment tests of new models to help us manage the risks of increasingly capable AI systems.”

This, according to the latter, has not disrupted its governance. Former members of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the creator of the ubiquitous AI chatbot ChatGPT, founded the AI startup.

This latest development follows Anthropic’s August announcement of a $100 million investment from the South Korean telecommunications behemoth SK Telecom.

That investment followed a collaboration between Anthropic and SK Telecom to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) for the latter’s Telco AI Platform.

Anthropic has contributed to significant AI community movements. In July, it joined Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and others in establishing the “Frontier Model Forum,” which aims to self-regulate the development of AI from within.

It has also participated in initiatives led by the United States government relating to the development and regulation of artificial intelligence, including a cybersecurity challenge aimed at bolstering its “critical infrastructure.”