Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic
Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, the two firms said, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier.
The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which like Google’s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI also operates an AI-powered, text analyzing chatbot. As part of the deal, Amazon said it has an option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.
TechCrunch reported exclusively earlier this year that Anthropic, which also counts Google as an investor, plans to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years. Anthropic, which earlier this month launched its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan of chatbot Claude 2, plans to build a “frontier model” — tentatively called “Claude-Next” — that is 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, according to a 2023 investor deck TechCrunch obtained earlier this year.
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