AWS, Amazon CEOs on ‘remarkable’ new US$4 billion Anthropic investment and partnership

'About a year ago, AWS became Anthropic’s primary cloud partner—which you can also see by the substantial momentum of Anthropic on Amazon Bedrock. Today, we become Anthropic’s primary foundation model training partner,’ says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

Amazon is betting big on Anthropic by investing an additional US$4 billion into the AI startup as Anthropic named Amazon Web Services as its new primary AI training partner.

The tech giant previously invested US$4 billion in Anthropic over the past year, pushing Amazon’s overall investment in OpenAI’s main rival to US$8 billion.

Both Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and AWS CEO Matt Garman weighed in on the company’s new bullish US$4 billion investment in Anthropic.

“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said Garman in a statement. “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who was previously AWS CEO, said he was excited about “deepening” his company’s partnership with the AI superstar startup.

“About a year ago, AWS became Anthropic’s primary cloud partner—which you can also see by the substantial momentum of Anthropic on Amazon Bedrock. Today, we become Anthropic’s primary foundation model training partner,” said Jassy.

Amazon’s CEO said Anthropic is excited about the “price-performance advantage that Trainium” offers. “We’re grateful for this confidence and partnership. Early days for what’s to come,” said Jassy.

Amazon and Anthropic’s revamped partnership

Amazon’s cloud business, AWS, is the world leader in cloud computing.

The US$110 billion Seattle-based cloud giant currently owns 31 percent share of the global enterprise cloud infrastructure services market.

With the new US$4 billion investment, Anthropic plans to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models. Both companies said they will continue to work closely to keep advancing Trainium's hardware and software capabilities.

This next partnership phase aims to further enhance the performance, security, and privacy that Amazon Bedrock provides for customers running Claude models.

Additionally, Anthropic and AWS have collaborated to give AWS customers early access to the ability to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic models.

“We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration,” said Garman.

Anthropic CEO: A year ‘of breakout growth for Claude’

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said it’s been “a year of breakout growth for Claude.”

Anthropic said it set new benchmarks for large language model (LLM) performance throughout 2024, as demonstrated by the Claude 3 and Claude 3.5 model families which are both available in Amazon Bedrock.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet was recently upgraded with advanced agentic capabilities including computer use. The AI startup said Claude 3.5 Sonnet now outperforms all publicly available models on agentic coding tasks.

“Our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock,” said Amodei in a statement. “We’re looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology.”