Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, the two companies said, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could can exist. the next great frontier.
The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which like Google’s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, also operates an AI-powered chatbot that analyzes text. As part of the deal, Amazon said it has an option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.
TechCrunch exclusively reported earlier this year that Anthropic, which also counts Google as an investor, plans to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years. Anthropic, which launched its first consumer-facing premium subscription of chatbot Claude 2 earlier this month, plans to build a “frontier model” – tentatively called “Claude-Next” – that is ten times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, according to a 2023 investor deck that TechCrunch obtained earlier this year.
But this development, the startup warned, will require $1 billion in spending over the next eighteen months. (Microsoft has invested a whopping $11 billion in OpenAI over the years.)
In Amazon, Anthropic has found a deep-pocketed strategic investor who can also provide the company with computing power to build future AI models and then find and help sell the offering to dozens of cloud customers.
As part of the investment deal, Anthropic will use Amazon’s cloud giant AWS as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including security research and the development of future base models, the e-commerce group said. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future base models. (Anthropic has been an AWS customer since 2021.)
Amazon believes it can help “improve many customer experiences, short and long term, through our deeper collaboration” with Anthropic, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that lets companies use different base models to build generative AI applications on top, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our partnership with Anthropic should help customers to get even more value from these two capabilities.”
Anthropic – which also counts Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Zoom among its backers – has raised a total of $2.7 billion to date. The startup was valued at around $5 billion in May this year, when it raised $450 million in a funding round. There was no mention of how Amazon valued Anthropic in the new investment.
The deal with Anthropic allows Amazon, which is increasingly flexing its own muscles around AI, to build a larger war chest in the rapidly growing industry.
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei told the TechCrunch Disrupt audience last week that he doesn’t see any barriers on the horizon for his company’s core technology.
“Over the past decade there has been a remarkable increase in the scale at which we train neural nets, and we continue to scale them up, and they continue to work better and better,” he said last week. “That’s the basis of my feeling that what we’re going to see in the next two, three, four years… what we see today is going to pale in comparison.”
Anthropic has made a “long-term” commitment to provide AWS customers worldwide access to future generations of its foundation models through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry’s best foundation models. Additionally, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique model customization and refinement capabilities.
“Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources, including computing power and research programs. Amazon’s investment and delivery of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we are equipped to continue pushing the boundaries of AI safety and research,” Anthropic said in a statement. “We look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale Claude adoption and deliver secure AI cloud technologies to organizations around the world.”