Amazon Announces Minority Ownership in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic AI, Completing $4 Billion Investment Deal

Amazon has invested $4 billion in ChatGPT’s rival artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, solidifying its minority ownership in the company. In a recent announcement, the e-commerce and technology giant revealed that it has injected an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, following an initial investment of $1.25 billion made back in September.Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, has emerged as a notable competitor to ChatGPT with its own AI chatbot named Claude. The company recently unveiled Claude 3, its most advanced version capable of analyzing images alongside its chat capabilities.

ChatGPT Rival Anthropic Chooses AWS as its Cloud Provider

As part of the investment deal, Amazon disclosed that Anthropic has chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for critical workloads, including safety research and future model development. Anthropic will leverage AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to construct, train, and deploy its upcoming models.“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and AI at AWS, said. He referred to generative AI as “the most transformational technology of our time.”

Amazon just made its largest outside investment in history at $2.75 Billion.

In none other than Anthropic.

This puts Anthropic's valuation at roughly $18.4 billion. pic.twitter.com/nt4yorTHGm

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) March 28, 2024

In addition to its significant AI investments, Amazon recently launched its own AI-powered assistant, Amazon Q, tailored for businesses. 

Amazon Q boasts chatbot capabilities, problem-solving abilities, content creation, and more.

While ChatGPT might be dominating the AI space in terms of popularity, Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is not the only one among tech giants eyeing the promising AI startup. 

In October of last year, Google announced a $500 million investment in Anthropic, with plans to increase it to $2 billion.

However, like many prominent AI chatbot developers, Anthropic has faced legal disputes concerning copyright and data infringement. 

The company battled a lawsuit filed by music label Universal Music Group (UMG) in January. 

UMG accused Anthropic of “unlawful” use, copying, and dissemination of copyrighted works from their catalog during AI training.

Three Major AI Blockchain Firms Merge

SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol are planning a merger of their crypto tokens to establish a decentralized AI platform and foster collaboration among the three companies.The companies are exploring the creation of an ASI token, which would possess a fully diluted value of approximately $7.5 billion.While the merger plans are subject to approval from the respective communities, an official announcement could be expected as early as Wednesday. Under the proposed arrangement, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol would maintain their separate operations while working together under the guidance of a newly formed entity called the Superintelligence Collective. However, not everyone is optimistic about AI-related crypto tokens. In a recent research report, leading crypto exchange Coinbase said the surge in the AI token market may be driven more by hype than actual utility.The report suggested that the value potential of many AI tokens may be overstated due to the prevailing attention on the AI industry, and that these tokens may lack sustainable demand-side drivers in the short to medium term.