Amazon agrees to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic

Background

Anthropic is an AI company that builds the Claude models. Amazon Bedrock, the AWS service through which customers use foundation models, was the route through which AWS customers would get access to Anthropic's models.^[2]

What happened

On 25 September 2023 Anthropic and Amazon announced that Amazon would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic and take a minority stake. Anthropic's governance structure was unchanged.^[1][2] AWS became Anthropic's primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and the development of future foundation models.^[1][2]

Key details

Anthropic would use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy future models, and the two companies would collaborate on future chip development.^[2] Trainium and Inferentia are AWS's own AI chips, one designed for training models and one for running them.

Anthropic committed to giving AWS customers long-term access to future Claude generations through Amazon Bedrock, with early access to customisation and fine-tuning. Fine-tuning means further training an existing model on a customer's own data.^[2]

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said: "We have tremendous respect for Anthropic's team and foundation models."^[2] Amazon's initial investment was $1.25 billion, and it invested the remaining $2.75 billion in March 2024.^[3]

A minority stake means Amazon holds a share of Anthropic without taking control of it. Anthropic's governance structure, meaning the arrangements for how its decisions are made, was left unchanged.^[1][2] Training large models needs very large amounts of computing hardware, so the choice of chips and cloud provider matters a great deal to a model developer.

Fine-tuning lets a customer adapt a model to its own material, such as its terminology or document style, and early access to it gave AWS customers an advance route to that capability.^[2]

Impact

The agreement tied Anthropic's cloud infrastructure and future model access closely to AWS, and it made Amazon a minority investor in Anthropic with an investment of up to $4 billion.^[1][2]