What is Anthropic? Amazon invests further $2.75bn in AI company behind Claude

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Amazon has announced a $2.75 billion (£2.1bn) investment in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence model that rivals ChatGPT and other programs.

The online retail behemoth is branching out further into the AI world and this latest injection will bring its total input to $4bn (£3.4bn), the Guardian has reported.

The move comes as Amazon looks to keep pace in the fast-moving world. The CEO behind X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk recently announced the expansion of xAI and the Twitter extension chatbot Grok.

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice-president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services, said: “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time.

“We believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Amazon Web Service’s UK boss Jeff Johnson recently said in an Evening Standard column that a larger field would only help the development of AI.

But what is Anthropic and what could it mean for artificial intelligence development?

What is Amazon’s AI startup Anthropic?

In its own words, Anthropic is “an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems”.

The company was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI — the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT.

Its calling card is the language model Claude, for which Anthropic has just launched its third update.

Claude 3 pledges to offer the same type of service as Grok, ChatGPT, and the Google equivalent Genesis (formerly Bard). It is free at entry level but has a premium tier for £18 per month, which gives members priority during busier periods.

A distinction is that it asks for users’ names which it then refers to in conversation.

Claude can also be used as an ‘application programming interface’ to allow software pieces to communicate with each other.

Amazon has been a big investor in Anthropic, putting in an initial $1.25bn last September. It has indicated that it could put in up to $4bn.

Additionally, Amazon owns a minority stake in Anthropic.

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