Amazon has just announced the largest venture investment in its 30-year history, which is aimed at its generative AI partner Anthropic, which builds Claude AI models to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In September last year, Amazon and Anthropic announced a $1.25 billion investment into the prominent AI startup, and now the retail giant is investing another $2.75 billion, completing the $4 billion investment it had promised in the past. Yesterday’s announcement from Amazon completes the second phase of the previously committed investment.
Despite the substantial investment, Amazon will continue to hold a minority stake in the AI company and will not even have a seat on Anthropic’s board of directors, as per the company’s announcement. According to an insider familiar with the matter, the transaction aligns with Anthropic’s most recent market valuation of approximately $18.4 billion.
Anthropic has successfully managed to finalize 5 different funding deals in the past year, raising an impressive total of $7.3 billion throughout the period. The company, which stands as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer sectors, was established by a group of former OpenAI research leaders and staff members.
The additional investment from Amazon comes shortly after Anthropic announced its latest generation of AI models, Claude 3, which is divided into three different sizes, Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus, with Opus being the largest of them all. Opus is said to rival OpenAI’s flagship GPT 4 model. Anthropic claims that Opus is also able to beat Google’s most powerful Gemini Ultra model on benchmark scores such as undergraduate-level knowledge, graduate-level reasoning, and basic mathematics.
Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS cloud provider said: “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”
Amazon’s recent investment underscores an ongoing expenditure surge among cloud service providers, all vying for dominance in the competitive field of artificial intelligence. This marks the second alteration to Anthropic’s financial framework within a single week.
