In advancing its AI capabilities, Amazon has struck a deal with Anthropic that includes an investment of up to $4 billion, giving it a minority ownership stake in the company.
The partners in the transaction described it as a strategic collaboration that will bring together their respective advanced technology and expertise in safer generative artificial intelligence development. An AWS customer since 2021, Anthropic has grown into a leading provider of foundation models that support artificial intelligence applications and is an advocate for the responsible deployment of generative AI. Its foundation model, dubbed Claude, handles a wide range of tasks from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction, while maintaining a high degree of reliability and predictability.
The companies noted that the deal would accelerate the advance of Anthropic’s future foundation models and make them widely accessible to Amazon Web Solutions customers.
In the collaboration, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, benefitting from the price, performance, scale and security provided by the Amazon business-to-business operation.
AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, such as safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic intends to run the majority of its workloads on AWS. Further, Anthropic is making a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock. Anthropic also will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.
In addition, the two companies also will work together on the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology, they stated.
“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short- and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. “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, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
