Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival

Amazon on Friday announced it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives.

The new funding brings the tech giant's total investment to $8 billion, though Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company behind the Claude chatbot and AI model.

Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic's "primary cloud and training partner," according to a blog post. From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.

Anthropic is the company behind Claude — one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, alongside tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are all part of a generative AI arms race to ensure they don't fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Some, like Microsoft and Amazon, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as working on in-house generative AI.

The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers "early access" to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic's Claude. It's a unique benefit for AWS customers, according to a company blog post.

In March, Amazon's $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company's largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September 2023.

Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic's board.

News of Amazon's additional investment comes one month after Anthropic announced a