Amazon to invest $4 billion in a rival of OpenAI, Anthropic.

• On Friday, Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, a startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives.
• The tech giant's total investment has reached $8 billion with the new funding, although Amazon will maintain its status as a minority investor.
• Anthropic has named Amazon Web Services as its "primary cloud and training partner," as stated in a blog post.

On Friday, Anthropic, the AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, announced that it would receive an additional $4 billion in investment.

The tech giant's total investment has reached $8 billion with the new funding, although Amazon will remain a minority investor, as per Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company behind the Claude chatbot and AI model.

Anthropic has named Amazon Web Services as its "primary cloud and training partner." The company will now use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that has gained immense popularity like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, is part of a generative AI arms race with startups such as OpenAI and tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. These companies are investing heavily in generative AI to ensure they remain competitive in a market predicted to reach $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

The partnership announced on Friday will provide AWS customers with "early access" to an Anthropic feature: the ability to fine-tune their own data on Anthropic's Claude. This is a unique benefit for AWS customers, as stated in a company blog post.

In September 2023, Amazon made an initial $1.25 billion investment in Anthropic, which was its largest outside investment in its three-decade history.

Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic's board.

One month after Anthropic achieved a significant milestone for Amazon, news emerged of the company's additional investment in AI technology.

Anthropic's latest AI models include a new Computer Use capability that enables its technology to interpret screen content, click buttons, enter text, navigate websites, and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing.

Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, stated in a CNBC interview last month that the tool can perform tasks with "tens or even hundreds of steps" using computers in a way that is similar to how we use them.

According to CNBC, Amazon had early access to Anthropic's tool, and early customers and beta testers included Asana, Canva, and Notion. The company had been working on the tool since early this year, as stated by Kaplan.

Anthropic launched its largest new product, Claude Enterprise, in September, which is designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic's AI. In June, the company debuted its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May, it rolled out its "Team" plan for smaller businesses.

Google pledged to invest $2 billion in Anthropic last year, following up on its earlier confirmation of a 10% stake in the startup and a significant cloud contract between the two companies.