Amazon has announced a significant $2.75 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, taking its total injection into the company to a remarkable $4 billion. The investment follows a previously announced fund commitment of $1.25 billion and is one of the largest investments of the year. Anthropic, which has developed Claude 3 Opus, considered the most powerful large language model in the world, outweighing rival GPT-4, has become a major competitor to OpenAI. The startup company, also backed by Google, is now significantly fueled by Amazon’s hefty financial weight.
Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s vice-president of data and AI, highlighted the strategic importance of the partnership, seeing generative AI as the most transformational technology of our era. Amazon’s decision to invest in Anthropic comes after Microsoft’s major move of bringing ex-DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman to head its CoPilot team from Inflection and purchasing $620 million rights to sell access to Inflection’s Pi models through its Azure Cloud.
Despite Amazon’s massive investment, it will still hold only a minority stake in Anthropic with no board representation. This shows a deliberate intent to foster innovation without overly influencing Anthropic’s strategic autonomy. The aim is to allow Anthropic to stay on its independent creative path especially in pondering with “Constitutional AI”, a significant focus of AI research.
However, such significant investments and acquisitions by Big Tech companies have sparked regulatory attention. The FTC, under Chair Lina Khan, known for her determined scrutiny of tech deals, has opened an inquiry into collaborations and investments between AI developers and major cloud service providers. In November 2023, Khan announced that the FTC would tighten investigative demands for AI companies, emphasising that no organization is exempt from antitrust laws. Additionally, the FTC has questioned Microsoft’s dealings with OpenAI and cautioned Reddit about data licensing pre-IPO.
These strategic investments and acquisitions underline how big tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft are vying for dominance in the rapidly evolving and complex field of AI. This underscores the vital role these alliances and partnerships, like that between Amazon and Anthropic, play in steering the trajectory of this swift-paced and transformative field.
