Amazon Strengthens Anthropic Partnership with $8 Billion AI Investment

On Friday, Amazon.Com Inc AMZN and Anthropic announced an expansion of their strategic partnership, strengthening their collaboration on artificial intelligence advancements.  

Anthropic raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon. This deepened alliance builds on Amazon’s $4 billion investment in Anthropic last year, which positioned Amazon Web Services (AWS) as Anthropic’s primary cloud provider.

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OpenAI rival Anthropic has now designated AWS as its primary training partner, utilizing AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to develop and deploy its next-generation foundation models.

Amazon’s latest cash investment increased its total funding in Anthropic to $8 billion, while Anthropic confirmed that Amazon remains a minority investor. So far, Anthropic has secured $13.7 billion in venture capital funding, TechCrunch cites Crunchbase.

Both companies are committed to advancing Trainium’s hardware and software capabilities, ensuring optimized performance, security, and privacy for customers leveraging Amazon Bedrock’s Claude models.

As part of the expanded collaboration, AWS customers will gain early access to fine-tune Anthropic models with their data, offering unique customization capabilities for the new Claude model family.

This exclusive feature aligns with Amazon’s focus on delivering cutting-edge generative AI solutions through its Bedrock platform.

Amazon Bedrock introduced Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Haiku and an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, showcasing their most advanced AI capabilities. Claude 3.5 Sonnet now includes enhanced agentic features like computer use, outperforming other publicly available models in Anthropic’s tests.

These innovations continue to drive enterprises such as HackerOne, HUDstats, and Sapio Sciences to adopt anthropopic models.

Matt Garman, AWS CEO, praised the collaboration, stating, “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating on Trainium chips, we’ll push the boundaries of generative AI technologies.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei emphasized the partnership’s impact, noting, “Our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users.”

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) scrutinized Amazon and Anthropic’s partnership following the Federal Trade Commission’s inquiry into Amazon’s $4 billion investment in September 2023. In September 2024, the CMA approved the partnership.

The regulator is examining whether the partnership resembles a merger and whether it could lead to anti-competitive practices within the artificial intelligence sector.

U.K. regulators are also investigating Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google’s $2 billion investment in Anthropic for potential competition concerns.

Price Action: AMZN stock is down 0.12% at $198.15 at the last check on Friday.

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