Amazon and Anthropic Announce Strategic Partnership

Amazon has announced it will be strengthening its collaboration with Anthropic to further accelerate advances in safe generative AI technologies. This partnership reinforces Amazon’s position in the GenAI space, ensuring it can keep pace with other big tech companies.

Amazon will invest $4 billion in Anthropic and take a minority stake in the company. Anthropic says that it will maintain its current corporate governance structure.

Anthropic will in turn use AWS as its primary cloud provider for its mission critical workloads and will use AWS proprietary Trainium and Inferentia chips to continue its development of foundation models. This will allow Anthropic to benefit from the price, performance, scaling capabilities and security of AWS.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will ensure AWS customers will have access to its foundation models through Amazon Bedrock, a full service platform that makes base models from AI companies available through an API. Anthropic will also grant early access to new features it develops to AWS customers.

With this partnership, Amazon developers can build GenAI capabilities into their applications and create new value and customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses. Organizations will also be able to incorporate Claude 2 into their projects. The chatbot received an upgrade since its inception earlier this year and is now available to use via API and through a beta website.

“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,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says.

Both Amazon and Anthropic are committed to promoting the responsible, safe, and secure development and deployment of technologies powered by AI.

Both companies are involved in a number of industry groups such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) AI working groups, the Global Partnership of AI (GPAI), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, believes that “by significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”