Amazon invests an additional $2.75 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic

Amazon.com Inc said it will invest an additional $2.75 billion in Anthropic, completing a deal struck last year to back the artificial intelligence startup and expand the partnership between the two companies. The capital injection brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion, following an earlier investment announced in September. Anthropic is a well-respected maker of artificial intelligence tools capable of text generation and analysis. As part of the deal, Amazon has the right to provide additional funding in the form of convertible notes, provided it does so by the end of March.

As part of the partnership, Anthropic also agreed to use Amazon Web Services data centers to power parts of its operations and to use Amazon’s custom computer chips. San Francisco-based Anthropic has also committed to using chips from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, another close partner.

Anthropic has ties to a number of big tech companies, including Google, which participated in a $450 million round led by Spark Capital last May. Google and Amazon Web Services are both Anthropic’s cloud computing partners.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, including Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario, who serves as CEO. The company has become one of OpenAI’s strongest competitors, raising billions of dollars in funding. Most of its customers are businesses, from search engine DuckDuckGo to travel guide publisher Lonely Planet.

The company offers a chatbot called Claude that emphasizes safe and responsible development of artificial intelligence. In early March, it launched new software for its chatbots that it said would be better able to carry out complex instructions and less prone to making things up.

Chatbots that can mimic human conversations have become a growing focus for Silicon Valley companies — with rapid advances in the technology fueling an investment frenzy. Chatbots themselves are not new. But the technology that powers Cloud and rival bots is a more powerful tool called a large language model, which is trained on vast amounts of data from the Internet to generate text, such as answers to questions or poems. Such tools are applications of generative artificial intelligence, where systems consider input such as text prompts and use it to output new content.

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