Amazon invests $4 billion in Anthropic, deepening its AI ties

LONDON — Amazon said Friday that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, a startup that competes with OpenAI and Google in the increasingly competitive field of artificial intelligence.

Over the past 14 months, Amazon has poured $8 billion into Anthropic, a sign of the urgency the tech giant feels to keep pace with its rivals in developing new AI tools that are reshaping the tech sector.

Money continues to flow into the biggest AI startups. Elon Musk’s xAI is in talks to raise new financing that could value the company at about $40 billion. In October, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion, bringing the company’s value to $157 billion.

“We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration,” Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon’s cloud computing division, AWS, said in a blog post announcing the deal.

The fundraising comes despite questions among some investors over whether the young, unprofitable companies will be able to develop businesses robust enough to justify their lofty valuations. The concerns are creating winners and losers. While Anthropic and OpenAI continue to raise significant sums, some smaller companies have essentially been folded into Google and Microsoft.

(In December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, claiming they used millions of articles published by the Times to build chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. Both companies have denied the claims.)

U.S. regulators are also scrutinizing the multibillion-dollar investments that Microsoft, Amazon and Google are putting into AI startups, which need the money because of the eye-popping sums required to develop cutting-edge AI models. But the deals are seen as allowing the big companies to form deep ties with their smaller rivals while avoiding most government scrutiny.

Like OpenAI, Anthropic is a developer of so-called generative AI, the technology capable of learning from vast amounts of data to create humanlike text and images. These tools are being used to create chatbots, including Anthropic’s Claude, but are also seen as having the potential to automate many tasks and reshape aspects of the global economy.

Anthropic has tried to position itself as one of the more responsible actors in the field of AI. The company’s executives have warned that the technology could pose an existential risk if not developed carefully.

As part of its relationship with Amazon, Anthropic is a customer of the company’s data centers, cloud-computing platform and semiconductors. That means Anthropic, based in San Francisco, will put some of its resources back into Amazon as it pays for computer servers and other services from the Seattle-based tech giant. The arrangement provides a boost for Amazon as it tries to gain ground on Nvidia, the market leader in selling AI chips.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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