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Amazon announced on Friday that it will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives.
Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company that developed the Claude chatbot and artificial intelligence model, said the new round brings the tech giant’s total investment to $8 billion, although Amazon will retain its status as a minority investor.
Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner,” according to a blog post. Starting now, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
Anthropic is the company behind Claude, a chatbot that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic, as well as tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, are participating in the generative AI arms race to ensure they don’t fall behind in the market. Expected to exceed US$1 trillion Income over ten years.
In March this year, Amazon invested US$2.75 billion in Anthropic, which was the company’s largest external investment in 30 years. The companies announced an initial investment of $1.25 billion in September 2023.
Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic’s board of directors.
News of Amazon’s additional investment comes a month after Anthropic announced a major milestone for the company: artificial intelligence agents that can use computers to complete complex tasks in the same way humans do.
Anthropic’s new computer usage features, part of two of its latest artificial intelligence models, allow its technology to interpret content on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and perform tasks through any software and real-time Internet browsing.
Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC last month that the tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” adding that it can do “dozens or even thousands of tasks.” “Hundred Steps” mission.
Anthropic told CNBC at the time that Amazon was early adopters of the tool, with early customers and beta testers including Asana, Canva and Notion. Kaplan said the company has been developing the tool since the beginning of this year.
In September, Anthropic launched Claude Enterprise, its largest new product since the debut of chatbots, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic’s artificial intelligence. In June, the company launched a more powerful artificial intelligence model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May launched a “Team” plan for small businesses.
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