Amazon to invest up to $4bn in AI firm

The investment will see Amazon take a minority ownership position in Anthropic, in addition to making Anthropic’s future foundation models available to Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

The agreement will see Anthropic use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, as well as collaborate over future Trainium and Inferentia technology.

In exchange, AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.

Anthropic will also provide AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock as well as early access to features for model customisation and fine-tuning capabilities.

Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance existing applications and create new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses.

Anthropic has been an AWS customer since 2021, and is a foundation model provider and advocate for the responsible deployment of generative AI, running the foundation model, Claude, for tasks such as dialogue and creative content generation, reasoning and detailed instruction.

Andy Jassy, chief executive at Amazon, said: “We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration.

“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive at Anthropic, said: “We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models.

“By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organisations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”