Amazon invests another $4 billion in Antrophic

Amazon will invest another 4 billion dollars in generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic bringing its total contribution to 8 billion dollars, according to a joint statement from the two companies released in the last few hours. Founded in 2021, Anthropic develops generative AI interfaces similar to ChatGPT and has become, step by step, one of OpenAI’s most ambitious competitors. Following this new investment, Jeff Bezos’ giant will remain a minority shareholder of this company based in San Francisco (California). Asked by AFP about Amazon’s exact stake in Anthropic, the company declined to comment. The group also did not respond to a question about its rating. In September, the website The Information reported that Anthropic was in discussions with several investors about acquiring a stake based on a valuation between 30 and 40 billion dollars.

With the expanded partnership, Anthropic will benefit from access to the infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, to store its data and develop its generative artificial intelligence models. Amazon had already invested $4 billion in Anthropic, in two tranches, one in September 2023 and the other in March 2024. It has also already integrated Anthropic’s models into its Amazon Bedrock platform, which also offers other interfaces, including those by Meta and Mistral AI.

Anthropic launched its generative assistant Claude in March 2023. It later offered new, more powerful versions, the latest of which is Claude 3.5 Sonnet, with capabilities superior to most of its competitors and close to those of OpenAI’s o1, launched in September. In addition to Amazon, Anthropic’s shareholders include Alphabet, Google’s parent companywhich invested $2 billion in the start-up last year.

According to Bloomberg, the US Department of Justice would like to push Alphabet to sell this stake, believing that it plays a role in the abuse of Google’s dominant position in the online search market.