Amazon has completed its largest external investment in company history by placing a $2.75 billion tranche in Anthropic. Anthropic is one of the fastest-growing generative AI (GenAI) companies. It was founded by former OpenAI research executives and has built a chatbot called Claude, which competes against OpenAI/ChatGPT.
In September, Amazon revealed it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The first tranche of $1.25 billion was set up then, and the remaining $2.75 billion was just completed. With this investment, Amazon will have a minority stake in Anthropic but not a board seat.
In the last year, Anthropic closed five funding deals totaling $7.3 billion. Several weeks ago, Anthropic revealed Claude 3, a suite of AI models that the company claims outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google Gemini Ultra based on industry benchmark tests like undergraduate-level knowledge and basic math.
Amazon said that as part of the strategic collaborative agreement, Anthropic uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, such as safety research and future foundation model development. And Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for building, training, and deploying its future models and has made a long-term commitment to providing AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock (AWS’s fully managed service that offers secure and easy access to fully managed foundation models).
Organizations of all sizes across virtually every industry are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. And they include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas, Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.
To also help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture also recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations, especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. And through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to sophisticated models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, And Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.
KEY QUOTE:
“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations. Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. 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.”
- Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS
