Amazon has announced that it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a top competitor to OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot.
The investment gives Amazon a close relationship with a leading AI startup, similar to Microsoft’s alliance with OpenAI. Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models, benefitting from the price, performance, scale, and security of AWS.
Amazon committed an initial $1.25 billion for a minority ownership stake in Anthropic, which could grow to $4 billion over time. The deal is significantly larger than Google’s investment of more than $300 million in Anthropic earlier this year.
By taking money from both Amazon and Google, Anthropic is embracing multiple cloud infrastructure companies, which distinguishes it from OpenAI’s exclusive partnership with Microsoft.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by veterans of OpenAI who vowed to produce a safer, more ethically rigorous AI product than OpenAI. Its ChatGPT competitor, Claude, has been well-reviewed but remains a relatively small player in the booming generative-AI market.
OpenAI is a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary, while Anthropic describes itself as a public benefit corporation.
The sources for this piece include an article in Axios.