It now gives Amazon access to generative AI tools on par with what Microsoft has with OpenAI and Google’s Gemini offering.race. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, Google has backed itself with Gemini, and now Amazon has further invested in Anthropic.
The reason for the additional investment was an option to invest further into the company with more favourable terms potentially elapsing at the end of the first financial quarter of 2024. With the end of March on the horizon, Amazon did not want the option to fall away, especially as it believes generative AI will have an impact in a myriad of its platforms, and in particular its AWS hyper scaling business.
“As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development,” Amazon noted in a “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock