Google Deepens Anthropic Partnership With New $1 Billion Investment
Google is reportedly investing more than $1 billion into artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic.
The tech giant had already given Anthropic around $2 billion and is now upping its stake in the company as it races to bolster its AI offerings, the Financial Times (FT) reported Wednesday (Jan. 22), citing sources with knowledge of the matter.
As the FT points out, Google created the technology that makes AI models like Anthropic’s Claude possible. However, the company has struggled to commercialize its AI, making the Anthropic investment a way to help it compete with the likes of Amazon and Meta.
Sources say Anthropic was also on the verge of landing another $2 billion from a group of venture capital investors. This additional deal was expected to bring Anthropic’s valuation to the neighborhood of $60 billion. It’s also in stiff competition from companies like OpenAI and xAI, along with Meta and Microsoft.
This latest investment from Google is on top of $8 billion Anthropic raised from Amazon, which is aiming to integrate Claude into the next iteration of its Alexa assistant tool.
As the FT notes, the close relationships between AI startups and their Big Tech sponsors were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during Joe Biden’s administration.
In a report issued in the closing days of the Biden administration, the FTC examined the relationship between cloud service providers like Google and AI developers such as Anthropic.
“As companies rapidly deploy generative AI technologies, enforcers and policymakers must stay vigilant to guard against business strategies that undermine open markets, opportunity and innovation,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a news release accompanying the report.
“The FTC’s report sheds light on how partnerships by big tech firms can create lock-in, deprive startups of key AI inputs and reveal sensitive information that can undermine fair competition.”
However, the FT report points out, Khan is scheduled to step down in the weeks ahead, leaving dealmakers more bullish about the connections between big tech and AI startups.
Also Wednesday, Sam Hamilton, head of AI and data for Visa, explored the impact of generative AI in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.
“I can’t think of one area that GenAI is not going to transform,” said Hamilton. “There’s going to be dramatic change … the AI timeline is very fast.”
AI large language models (LLMs) are “progressing nicely” Hamilton said: the ways in which we interact with computers are evolving to a state where it may feel as though we’re talking to another human being, not a machine.
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