Amazon announced Friday that it will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives.

The new funding brings the tech giant’s total investment to $8 billion, although Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company behind cloud chatbots and AI models. Company.

Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner,” according to a blog post. From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.

Claude is the company behind Anthropic — a chatbot that has exploded in popularity with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft And MetaAll of these are part of a creative AI arms race to ensure they are not left behind in the market It is predicted to reach 1 trillion dollars. in revenue within a decade.

Some, like Microsoft and Amazon, are Backing generative AI startups with heavy investment As well as working on creative AI in-house.

The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers “early access” to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to fine-tune their data on Anthropic’s Claude. According to the company’s blog post, this is a unique benefit for AWS customers.

In March, Amazon’s $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company’s largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The companies announced. Initial $1.25 billion investment In September 2023.

Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic’s board.

News of Amazon’s additional investment comes a month later. Anthropic announced. A major milestone for the company: AI agents that can use computers to complete complex tasks like a human would.

Anthropic’s new computer usability capability, part of its two latest AI models, allows its tech to interpret what’s on the computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites, and any Software and real-time internet browsing allows tasks to be performed.

The tool “can use computers basically the same way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview last month, adding that it would take “tens or can work with “hundreds of steps”.

Amazon had early access to the tool, Anthropic told CNBC at the time, and early users and beta testers included Asana, Canva and Notion. According to Kaplan, the company had been working on the device since earlier this year.

In September, Anthropic Rolled out Cloud Enterprise.The chatbot is its biggest new product since its debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic’s AI. i Junthe company debuted its more powerful AI model, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May, it announced its A “team” plan for small businesses.

Last year, Google determination to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, after previously confirming that it had a 10 percent stake in the startup, along with a major cloud contract between the two companies.