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AWS Completes Its $4B Funding of Claude AI Maker Anthropic
Amazon Web Services has ponied up full amount of its promised $4 billion investment in generative AI company Anthropic.
Anthropic and AWS first inked the deal last September. As part of its terms, AWS would become a minority owner in Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot and family of AI foundational models. In return, Anthropic would use AWS' vast cloud infrastructure, as well as its AI-optimized line of Trainium processors, to support the development of its AI models.
AWS' initial investment in Anthropic amounted to $1.25 billion. This week, AWS made good on the remaining $2.75 billion.
"Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time," said Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS' AI chief, in a prepared statement, "and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers' experiences, and look forward to what's next."
Anthropic has been on a fundraising spree over the past year. Besides AWS, other notable investors include Google, Salesforce and VC firm Menlo Ventures, which collectively pushed Anthropic's total estimated value to $15 billion as of this February, according to The New York Times, citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter.
At the time of AWS' first cash infusion, Anthropic was in the midst of developing and releasing Version 2 of its Claude model. Since then, it has released Claude 3, which comprises three separate models. The most advanced of these, dubbed Opus, was found to "outperform its peers on most of the common evaluation benchmarks for AI systems," according to Anthropic's own testing. (By "peers," it means both OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 and Google's Gemini Ultra models.)
The Claude 3 models are available on AWS' Bedrock service, which gives developers access to foundation models from AWS partners like Anthropic to build generative AI-powered apps. As part of its deal with AWS, Anthropic had promised to put future versions of its models in Bedrock, as well as to use the platform to give AWS customers early access to upcoming Claude features.
Noted Sivasubramanian, "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 Trainium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock, further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI."