Amazon takes minority share in ChatGPT rival Anthropic AI

Amazon has fulfilled its $4 billion investment commitment to AI startup Anthropic, announcing a minority ownership stake in the company and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud service provider.

The web services giant Amazon said that it is fulfilling its $4 billion investment commitment to the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic. 

In a post on March 27, Amazon said it now holds a minority ownership position in the company after investing an additional $2.75 billion. Last September, Amazon announced its investment intentions and made an initial investment of $1.25 billion.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI. It has created its own AI chatbot, rivaling ChatGPT, called Claude.

In early March, Anthropic released its most powerful version, Claude 3, which can also analyze images.

Amazon also revealed that Anthropic would be making Amazon Web Services (AWS) its main cloud provider for “mission-critical workloads.” This includes safety research and the development of future foundation models.

It also said that Anthropic would use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future models.

Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS, said they see the collaboration as something that will “further improve” their customers’ experience and called generative AI “the most transformational technology of our time.”

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Alongside its major AI investments, Amazon also launched its own AI-powered assistant built for businesses, which it calls “Amazon Q.” Its chatbot is said to be able to chat, solve problems, create content and more. 

Amazon is not the only Big Tech company eyeing a stake in Anthropic. Last October, Google announced a $500 million investment in the company with a commitment to increase to $2 billion.

Anthropic, like all the major AI chatbot developers, has found itself involved in legal battles over copyright and data infringement.

In January, the company fought a lawsuit filed by music label Universal Music Group (UMG), calling the claims invalid.

The AI startup was sued by the label for “unlawful” use and “unlawfully” copying and disseminating “vast amounts of copyrighted works” from UMG while training its AI models.

Around this same time, Anthropic updated its commercial terms of service saying that no client data was used in AI training and that it would protect customers from copyright infringement claims arising from the authorized use of the company’s services or outputs.