Amazon Completes $4B Investment In AI Startup Anthropic

The tech giant announced the final $2.75 billion investment in a blog post Wednesday.

Amazon has made good on its promised $4 billion investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, finally giving Anthropic the final $2.75 billion just before the expiration of the agreement.

Seattle-based cloud giant Amazon said in a blog post Wednesday that it gave Anthropic the final investment, which was first revealed in September as part of a deal for Anthropic to build, train and deploy AI models on Amazon Web Services Trainium and Inferentia chips while giving AWS customers access to Anthropic foundation models on the fully managed Amazon Bedrock service.

“The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning,” according to the blog post.

Amazon Invests In Anthropic AI

CRN has reached out to Amazon and Anthropic for comment.

In an Amazon regulatory filing for the 2023 fiscal year, the vendor disclosed that the initial $1.25 billion note is convertible to equity and that the additional $2.75 billion convertible note was part of an agreement set to expire at the end of 2024’s first quarter – which ends this week.

The investment comes on the heels of San Francisco-based Anthropic – founded in 2021 by siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, who previously worked at Microsoft-backed Anthropic rival OpenAI – unveiling its Claude 3 model family, promising increased capabilities in analysis, forecasting, nuanced content creation, code generation, conversing in non-English languages and other actions.

Anthropic has said that its most powerful Claude 3 model, Opus, scores higher than OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini in areas including undergraduate level knowledge and math problem solving – although GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0 Ultra bested the lesser Claude 3 models in some of these benchmarks.

Amazon and Anthropic have shown an interest in bringing in solution providers to further AI’s penetration, recently announcing a collaboration with Accenture – No. 1 on CRN’s 2023 Solution Provider 500.

“Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases,” Amazon said in the Wednesday blog post.

Microsoft reportedly has a $13 billion investment in OpenAI. Earlier this month, the vendor reportedly paid AI startup Inflection AI at least $650 million to hire Inflection employees – including its CEO – and use the startup’s AI models.

The deals come amid more scrutiny from the United States’ federal government over unusual relationships between tech giants such as Microsoft and Google and smaller AI organizations including OpenAI and Anthropic.