Amazon invests $4B in AI startup rival to OpenAI
Anthropic announced Friday that the company is receiving a $4 billion investment from Amazon to help advance the startup's efforts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
The new funding brings Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion and maintains the tech giant's position as a minority investor in the startup. Anthropic is a leading rival to OpenAI, the Sam Altman-led AI startup that has received about $13 billion in investment from Microsoft.
It also establishes that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be the primary cloud and training partner for Anthropic.
Anthropic is the builder of the Claude AI assistant, which is available through Amazon Bedrock – a service that Amazon released last year that gives customers the ability to customize models from third-party providers like Anthropic to meet their various needs.
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The company noted in its announcement that Claude is being used as core infrastructure for "tens of thousands of companies seeking reliable, practical AI solutions at scale."
Among those companies is Pfizer, which is using Claude in Bedrock to speed research and delivery timelines for critical medicines and reduce operational costs.
Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, is leveraging Claude in Bedrock to explain complex tax calculations for users. The European Parliament is also using Claude to power "Archibot" to make 2.1 million official documents instantly searchable and easier to analyze in multiple languages.
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Anthropic is working with Annapurna Labs at AWS to develop and optimize future generations of Trainium accelerators to advance the capabilities of the company's specialized machine learning hardware.
The startup's engineers work with Annapurna's chip design team to maximize the computational efficiency of hardware that will be leveraged to train Anthropic's most advanced foundation models. The company said this development approach lets it "optimize every aspect of model training from the silicon up through the full stack."
The announcement said that the Anthropic-AWS partnership is helping drive advanced AI research for next-generation models and tools.
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"Together with AWS, we're laying the technological foundation – from silicon to software – that will power the next generation of AI research and development," Anthropic wrote. "By combining Anthropic's expertise in frontier AI systems with AWS's world-class infrastructure, we're building a secure, enterprise-ready platform that gives organizations of all sizes access to the forefront of AI technology."