| November 28, 2024
Amazon announced on Friday it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives. This new funding brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, although Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) will also become Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner,” according to a blog post from Amazon. As part of this deal, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
Anthropic’s Growing Impact in the AI Space
Anthropic is the company behind Claude, one of the most popular chatbots in competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Startups like Anthropic, alongside tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, are part of a generative AI arms race to capture a market predicted to surpass $1 trillion in revenue within the next decade.
Amazon’s backing of generative AI startups and its focus on in-house AI development make it a key player in this rapidly evolving sector.
A Unique AWS Partnership
The partnership announced on Friday will give AWS customers “early access” to an Anthropic feature: the ability to do fine-tuning with their own data on Claude. This is a unique benefit for AWS customers, as described in Amazon’s blog post.
In March, Amazon’s $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company’s largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The companies had previously announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September 2023.
Anthropic’s New Computer Use Capabilities
News of Amazon’s additional investment comes one month after Anthropic revealed a significant milestone: AI agents capable of using a computer to complete complex tasks like a human. Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability enables its tech to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites, and execute tasks across any software, with real-time internet browsing.
This tool can perform tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps,” said Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s Chief Science Officer. Amazon had early access to this tool, and other beta testers included Asana, Canva, and Notion. Anthropic had been working on the tool since early 2024.
In September, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest product launch since Claude’s debut. The company also launched Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024 and introduced a “Team” plan for smaller businesses in May.
Last year, Google committed to investing $2 billion in Anthropic and took a 10% stake in the startup, along with a large cloud contract.
