Amazon To Invest Up To $4 Billion In Anthropic

By Amit Chowdhry • Sep 25, 2023

Anthropic announced that online retail giant Amazon is going to invest up to $4 billion in the AI research startup company. This agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop the industry’s most reliable and high-performing foundation models. Our frontier safety research and products, together with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) expertise in running secure, reliable infrastructure, will make Anthropic’s safe AI widely accessible to AWS customers.

AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips – which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment. And together, the companies will combine their expertise to collaborate on developing future Trainium and Inferentia technology.

Based on significant AWS customer demand for Claude, Anthropic is also expanding its support of Amazon Bedrock. This includes secure model customization and fine-tuning the service to enable enterprises to optimize Claude’s performance with expert knowledge while limiting potential harmful outcomes.

Amazon developers and engineers will also be able to build on top of Anthropic’s state-of-the-art models via Amazon Bedrock. This will enable them to incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance its current applications, and create net-new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses.

Organizations can use Claude 2 for a wide range of tasks, from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction. And Anthropic’s industry-leading 100,000 token context window will help them securely process extensive amounts of data, including technical, domain-specific documents for use cases across finance, legal, coding, etc.

Enterprises across various industries are already building with Anthropic models on Amazon Bedrock. For example, LexisNexis Legal & Professional (a global provider of information and analytics) uses a custom fine-tuned Claude 2 model to provide conversational search, insightful summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities through the company’s new Lexis+ AI solution. And asset management firm Bridgewater Associates is building an investment analyst assistant powered by Claude 2 to generate elaborate charts, compute financial indicators, and create summaries of the results. Plus, Lonely Planet – a renowned travel publisher – has reduced its itinerary generation costs by almost 80 percent after deploying Claude 2, thus synthesizing its decades of travel content to deliver cohesive, highly accurate travel recommendations.

Anthropic and Amazon are committed to the training and deploying advanced foundation models. Both these companies are actively engaged across several organizations to promote the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies, including the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the Partnership on AI (PAI), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). And in July, both Amazon and Anthropic independently supported a set of voluntary safety commitments led by the White House to ensure that the future of transformative AI is guided by safety, security, and trust.

As part of the investment, Amazon will take a minority stake in Anthropic. Training state-of-the-art models requires major resources, including computing power and research programs. Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure Anthropic is equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research.

KEY QUOTES:

“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.”

– Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO

“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models. Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”

– Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic

“We are developing a generative AI solution on AWS to help customers plan epic trips and create life-changing experiences with personalized travel itineraries. By building with Claude 2 on Amazon Bedrock, we reduced itinerary generation costs by nearly 80 percent when we quickly created a scalable, secure AI platform that organizes our book content in minutes to deliver cohesive, highly accurate travel recommendations. Now we can re-package and personalize our content in various ways on our digital platforms, based on customer preference, all while highlighting trusted local voices–just like Lonely Planet has done for 50 years.”

– Chris Whyde, senior vice president of Engineering and Data Science at Lonely Planet

“At Bridgewater, we believe the global economic machine can be understood, so we strive to build a fundamental, cause-and-effect understanding of markets and economies powered by cutting-edge technology. Working with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, we are using Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude model to create a secure large language model-powered Investment Analyst Assistant that will be able to generate elaborate charts, compute financial indicators, and create summaries of the results, based on both minimal and complex instructions. This flexible solution will accelerate the more mundane, yet still involved, steps of our research process, enabling our analysts to spend more time on the difficult and differentiated aspects of understanding markets and economies.”

– Greg Jensen, co-CIO at Bridgewater Associates

“We are working with AWS and Anthropic to host our custom, fine-tuned Anthropic Claude 2 model on Amazon Bedrock to support our strategy of rapidly delivering generative AI solutions at scale and with cutting-edge encryption, data privacy, and safe AI technology embedded in everything we do. Our new Lexis+ AI platform technology features conversational search, insightful summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities, which enable lawyers to increase their efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity.”

– Jeff Reihl, executive vice president and CTO at LexisNexis Legal & Professional