Amazon Invests an Additional $4B in AI Firm Anthropic

(Bloomberg) --

Amazon.com Inc. is investing an additional $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, boosting its stake in one of OpenAI’s chief rivals.

The new infusion, announced by the companies on Friday, follows a $4 billion investment in Anthropic completed earlier this year. That deal included provisions that Anthropic use Amazon Web Services data centers for some of its computing needs, as well as AWS-designed AI chips. Anthropic also has close ties with Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

The latest investment “establishes AWS as our primary cloud and training partner,” Anthropic said in a blog post, adding that the startup plans to use Amazon’s AI chips to develop its most advanced models. The deal maintains Amazon’s minority stake in the company, Anthropic said. 

Founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, Anthropic has become one of the ChatGPT maker’s closest rivals. Its Claude family of chatbots is widely seen as among the most capable of generating text from scratch. Amazon has used its close relationship with Anthropic to bolster its credentials in AI services, offering the Claude models to clients on the AWS marketplace of AI model providers.

OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in funding in October at a $157 billion valuation. Elon Musk’s xAI, meanwhile, has been seeking to raise funding at a $40 billion valuation, Bloomberg previously reported.

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Like other AI companies, Anthropic’s funding deals have come under scrutiny from regulators who worry that big tech is using large investments and cloud computing partnerships to dominate the emerging AI sector.

The UK’s competition watchdog recently cleared the prior investments from Amazon and Google into Anthropic. But the US Justice Department is now seeking to unwind Google’s Anthropic deal in particular.

Amazon shares were little changed as the markets opened in New York on Friday.