Amazon.com (AMZN.O) on Monday said it will invest up to $4 billion in cash in the high-profile startup Anthropic to compete with growing cloud rivals that have also focused their businesses on artificial intelligence. As part of the deal, which gives Amazon a minority ownership position in Anthropic, the company’s employees and cloud customers will gain early access to technology from the San Francisco-based startup that they can infuse into their businesses. The deal also sees Anthropic rely primarily on Amazon’s cloud services, including training its future AI models — “frontier” models — on the company’s proprietary AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.
The company’s investment will help Anthropic develop its next-generation AI systems to tackle challenging tasks that current models can’t handle. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the firm’s upcoming “frontier model,” currently testing in chatbot Claude, will be ten times more capable than today’s most advanced systems.
Amodei is one of several former OpenAI executives who founded Anthropic, which was set up in 2021 and has since raised more than $1 billion. The company is among a series of startups creating so-called generative AI systems that draft content like a human had created it. However, Amodei says his company’s emphasis on training AI to adhere to ethical values sets it apart from competitors.
Although it is lagging behind the likes of OpenAI regarding the speed at which it deploys its models, Amodei says his team is working to ensure they do so responsibly and that their work benefits society. He adds that while there are commercial incentives to releasing new models, the primary motivation for his team is safety research.
Aside from its flagship Claude AI chatbot, Anthropic has several other products under development. The latest of these, Bedrock, lets users build generative AI applications by providing a starting point or foundation model. Bedrock has been popular enough to attract thousands of users, but the company has emphasized that it will continue to support other foundational AI models.
In addition to boosting demand for Bedrock, the Amazon-Anthropic partnership could boost demand for custom chips that power AI models. That could benefit NVIDIA Corp., which uses the graphics processing units – or GPUs – in many of these systems. It could also help boost sales of Amazon Web Services, as the company would have a reason to encourage its customers to use the service to host their AI models. However, it is unclear how much of a boost the deal will provide for either of these efforts.
