Amazon doubles down on Anthropic with $4 billion investment

Amazon has announced an additional $4 billion investment in Anthropic, the AI startup known for its Claude chatbot and advanced AI models.

This latest funding brings Amazon’s total investment in the San Francisco-based company to $8 billion, while Amazon retains a minority stake.

The companies are deepening their collaboration following their initial strategic partnership announced last September, when Amazon first invested $4 billion and Anthropic designated AWS as its primary cloud provider.

Under the expanded agreement, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models.

“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said Matt Garman, AWS CEO.

AWS customers will receive early access to fine-tune Anthropic models with their own data, a feature that will be exclusively available for each new Claude model for a limited time.

The expanded partnership comes as Anthropic unveils new capabilities in its AI models.

The Claude 3.5 Haiku and upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet introduce advanced agentic features, including computer-use capability.

These enhancements allow AI systems to perform complex tasks, such as navigating software, interpreting on-screen content, and browsing the internet in real time.

“This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic.

The partnership underscores Amazon’s strategy in the generative AI arms race, joining rivals like Microsoft, Google, and Meta.

Companies such as Pfizer, Intuit, and the European Parliament already leverage Claude’s capabilities through Amazon Bedrock, using its advanced AI to power applications in research, business automation, and document analysis.