Despite the investment, Amazon remains a minority investor in Anthropic, which has raised a total of $13.7 billion in venture capital to date. The company has been discussing new funding at a $40 billion valuation and is reportedly set to replace the in-house models powering Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa. The collaboration and investments have attracted regulatory scrutiny, with the FTC requiring Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to explain the impacts of their investments in AI startups on the competitive landscape.
Key takeaways:
- Anthropic, a rival of OpenAI, has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon, bringing Amazon's total investment in the company to $8 billion. The company has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) the primary place to train its AI models.
- Anthropic is also working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’ chipmaking division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS’ custom-built chips for training AI models.
- Anthropic's AI models are being used by tens of thousands of companies through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’ platform for hosting and fine-tuning models. Amazon is also reportedly planning to replace the in-house models powering Alexa with Anthropic’s models.
- The investments and collaborations between Amazon and Anthropic have attracted regulatory scrutiny, with the FTC requiring the companies to explain the impacts their investments in startups such as Anthropic have on the competitive landscape of generative AI.