Amazon Invests Another $4B In AI Firm Anthropic

Amazon is investing another $4 billion into the generative artificial intelligence firm Anthropic as it continues to pour resources into AI tech.

The tech giant, which also owns Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said Friday that the deal will see Anthropic make Amazon’s AWS division “its primary training partner and will use AWS Trainium to train and deploy its largest foundation models.”

The investment will also give AWS customers some benefits, including the ability to fine-tune their data, “a customization benefit that AWS customers will uniquely enjoy for each model for a period of time on new Claude models,” the company says.

Anthropic is the company behind Claude, one of the most widely-used AI models on the market, alongside the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama. Amazon had previously invested $2.75 billion in Anthropic just six months ago.

The companies also listed a slew of customers using Anthropic models in conjunction with AWS, including the PGA Tour, Perplexity, T-Mobile, and many others.

The rise of generative AI is not without controversy, as tech companies have launched a lobbying effort meant to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train AI models. Anthropic itself is facing a lawsuit from authors who argued that the company “usurped a licensing market for copyright owners” by downloading the works without seeking to compensate the authors.

And Amazon has been rapidly rolling out AI-powered products as well. In the video space, it recently launched AI-generated recaps on Prime Video.

“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said Matt Garman, AWS CEO. “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration.”

“This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “We’re looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology.”