Amazon strengthens Anthropic ties with $2.75bn investment

The latest investment gives Amazon a minority ownership position in Anthropic, which is already backed by the likes of Google and Salesforce.

The e-commerce giant looking to grab its share of the AI pie first invested $1.25bn in Anthropic last September, when it announced that its cloud business Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be the primary cloud provider for the company.

Earlier this month, Amazon announced access to Access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models, which makes high-performance foundation models available for use to start-ups as well as Amazon developers and engineers.

“The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities,” the company wrote in an announcement yesterday (27 March)

“Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today – including OpenAI’s GPT-4 – in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.”

As part of the deal struck in September, Anthropic has been using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models. The two will also work together on improving the chips in the future.

Anthropic was co-founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021 and is based in San Francisco. It’s Claude series of large language models are in direct competition with OpenAI’s GPT models.

Last year, Google parent Alphabet invested $300m in Anthropic for a 10pc stake, according to a Financial Times report. As a result, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems.”

And last week, the OpenAI rival became the second major AI company (after the ChatGPT creator) to open its first EU office in Dublin as it looks to expand in Europe. While its flagship product, Claude, is not yet available in the EU, Anthropic hopes Ireland will be its main base in the bloc.

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