Amazon Completes $4B Anthropic Investment

Amazon has finalized a $4 billion investment in generative AI startup Anthropic. The additional $2.75 billion funding for a minority ownership stake in Anthropic completes the option in the initial deal announced in September with an upfront $1.25 billion from Amazon.

Amazon Anthropic

The investment, though enormous, is part of a larger strategic collaboration agreement committing Anthropic to using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for research and development. Anthropic has also made a long-term pledge to offer access to its future foundation models on the AWS generative AI platform Amazon Bedrock.

The decision to increase funding isn’t a major surprise as Anthropic and Amazon have been building links at a steady clip since September. Earlier this month, Amazon launched access to Anthropic’s new Claude 3 AI model family on Bedrock. The Claude 3 models demonstrate advanced capabilities in areas like reasoning, math, coding, and new vision skills. Benchmarks show the flagship Claude 3 Opus outperforming other leading AI like OpenAI’s GPT-4 across certain tasks.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” AWS vice president of data and AI Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian explained in a blog post. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the-art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Anthropic’s models are among the few highly capable AI systems currently available at scale for enterprise and consumer applications. To further drive enterprise adoption, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced a collaboration to help regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and government securely deploy and scale generative AI solutions customized to their needs. A wide range of organizations across industries are already building generative AI applications on Bedrock using Anthropic’s models, including ADP, Deloitte, Delta Air Lines, Pfizer, the PGA Tour, and Siemens. As Voicebot founder Bret Kinsella predicted in our Synthedia newsletter following Claude 3’s introduction, Amazon Bedrock is well positioned for success thanks to its now even deeper ties to Anthropic.

“The other winner here is Amazon Bedrock. Azure is winning many enterprise generative AI deals today because it is the only public cloud option for accessing OpenAI’s foundation models. When OpenAI had the two most performant models in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the other cloud ecosystems were at a competitive disadvantage. Now AWS has a true GPT-4 rival in Claude 3, while Google Cloud has that model coming soon to sit alongside the Gemini model family,” Kinsella wrote. “Competition among LLM providers is about to get more interesting. The biggest unknown at the moment is when GPT-5 will be released (or GPT-4.5) and how much it will raise the performance bar. Epoch 2 of the LLM wars has arrived.”

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