Amazon spreads its AI bets with up to $4 billion investment into OpenAI rival Anthropic

• Amazon plans to invest $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, the firm announced Monday.
• Anthropic is a competitor to OpenAI and is best known for its large language model Claude.
• The move gives Amazon a stake in a foundational AI company to compete with Microsoft and Google.

Amazon is set to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a leading rival to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, as it prepares to up the stakes in the AI wars.

The deal gives Amazon a minority stake in Anthropic, while the startup will use AWS cloud and Trainium, a chip purpose-built by Amazon to rival Nvidia's processors and support the training of AI models.

Anthropic, which bills itself as an "AI safety and research company," was founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI.

It is the developer behind Claude, an AI assistant it describes as a "friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant" that can respond to text inputs and instructions in a more conversational way than ChatGPT.

The investment by Amazon marks ongoing competition in the AI wars, as major companies take bets on emerging, cutting-edge startups. Google has also invested in Anthropic, while Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI. The benefit to startups is getting access to expensive cloud compute and infrastructure as they train new models.

Amazon said that AWS customers will be able to gain access to Anthropic's technology, with Anthropic set to provide "early access to unique features" around customization and fine-tuning capabilities.

"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," said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

In June, it was reported that Anthropic had a valuation of $4.6 billion after raising $750 million. Earlier this year, it emerged that $300 million had come from Google.