Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic

Amazon on Monday said it will invest up to $4 billion in ChatGPT rival Anthropic, making the e-commerce giant a minority shareholder in the Alphabet-backed generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup.

As part of the deal, Anthropic has selected AWS as its primary cloud provider and will train and deploy its future foundation models, taking advantage of AWS's machine learning accelerators, Amazon says in a statement.

AWS will become Anthropic's primary cloud provider for critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development, the statement says.

This is the latest AWS generative AI announcement as the cloud computing major continues to expand its offering across all layers of the generative AI stack. With today's announcement, customers will have early access to features for customizing Anthropic models, using their own proprietary data to create their own private models, and will be able to utilise fine-tuning capabilities via a self-service feature within Amazon Bedrock, the company says.

The deal comes over seven months after Google parent Alphabet said it would buy a 10% stake in Anthropic. Earlier in January, Microsoft Corp announced a multibillion-dollar investment ChatGPT owner OpenAI in an effort to commercialise the advanced AI technologies across its consumer and enterprise products.

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, it says.

"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," says Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. "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."

"We are excited to use AWS's Trainium chips to develop future foundation models," says 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."

An AWS customer since 2021, Anthropic has grown quickly into one of the world’s leading foundation model providers and a leading advocate for the responsible deployment of generative AI. The startup was founded in January 2021 by the team behind AI breakthroughs such as GPT-3 and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Anthropic began deploying its technology publicly, starting off with a language model assistant named Claude earlier this year.