Amazon has finalized its biggest venture investment yet, injecting $4 billion in funding into the AI startup Anthropic.

by Jaswinder Kaur / 28-03-2024 / comments

Amazon has completed its largest external investment yet by putting $2.75 billion into the AI startup Anthropic. This move is part of a broader funding initiative, first announced in September, where Amazon committed up to $4 billion. Anthropic, a frontrunner in generative AI, is renowned for its foundation model and chatbot Claude, which directly competes with OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Amazon's investment leaves it with a minority stake in Anthropic and no board seat. Over the past year, Anthropic has secured five funding rounds totaling about $7.3 billion. The company's offerings directly challenge OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amazon's investment news coincides with the launch of Claude 3, Anthropic's latest suite of AI models, claimed to be its fastest and most potent yet, surpassing OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini Ultra on industry benchmarks.

The surge in investment in generative AI is evident, with a record $29.1 billion invested across almost 700 deals in 2023 alone. As per the investment agreement, Anthropic will primarily utilize AWS as its cloud provider and Amazon's chips for training, constructing, and deploying its foundation models. Other tech giants like Microsoft and Google have also invested in Anthropic.

Nevertheless, the growing complexity of AI models presents potential risks, as seen when Google had to take its AI image generator offline due to historical inaccuracies. Unlike image generation, Anthropic's Claude 3 enables users to upload images and documents for analysis. Prior to this investment, Amazon's largest venture investment was in electric vehicle maker Rivian, where it invested over $1.3 billion.