Amazon has announced it is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a startup that builds safe and steerable AI models.
The deal, which marks a crucial step in their collaborative efforts to advance the field of artificial intelligence, will see Amazon Web Services (AWS) become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for missioncritical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.
In return, Anthropic will gain access to Amazon’s advanced infrastructure through AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, complementing their existing solutions for model training and deployment.
Through the collaboration, the firms are aiming is to drive the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology to support further innovation in AI. Amazon will acquire a minority stake in Anthropic, with the company’s corporate governance structure remaining intact, the firms said in a statement.
In addition, Anthropic is expanding its support of Amazon Bedrock by enabling enterprises to optimise the performance of its own AI assistant, Claude while mitigating potential risks. It means that developers and engineers at Amazon will gain access to Anthropic’s models via Amazon Bedrock, opening the door to incorporate generative AI capabilities into a wide array of applications.
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Speaking on the deal, “Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO said: “Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of. AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic said: “Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”
Several prominent organisations have already embraced Anthropic models on Amazon Bedrock. LexisNexis Legal & Professional utilises a custom Claude 2 model to deliver conversational search, summarisation, and legal drafting capabilities. Bridgewater Associates is developing an investment analyst assistant powered by Claude 2, while Lonely Planet has significantly reduced its itinerary generation costs through this AI solution.
The collaboration is also set to focus on promoting safety best practices on Amazon Bedrock by engaging with organisations such as the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the Partnership on AI (PAI), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
