Amazon's employees and cloud customers will gain early access to technology from Anthropic
SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon.com on Monday said it will invest up to $4 billion in cash in the high-profile startup Anthropic, in its effort to compete with growing cloud rivals on artificial intelligence.
They declined to state how much Amazon now would own of Anthropic or the startup's updated valuation, last estimated at more than $4 billion. Amazon said it would not gain a board seat and that its stake amounted to a minority position. Google meanwhile helped pioneer this branch of AI and in May invested in Anthropic's $450-million fundraise, in a relationship the startup said is not going away.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, said his company "has obtained the money in a way that allows it to prioritize safety" and "allows us to continue to scale up our models."Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives including Amodei, is one of a series of companies building so-called generative AI, systems that can draft content as if a human created it. Anthropic has aimed to distinguish its work by training AI to adhere to moral values.
Anthropic's Claude 2 is an AI model that is able to respond to particularly large prompts, setting it up to analyze long business or legal documents.