Anthropic Keeps Amazon in AI Contest

In Thursday’s Briefing newsletter, my colleague Cory Weinberg reported that bankers at Goldman Sachs’ private tech gathering this week had asked, “For big tech, is capex the new M&A?” as part of a slide presentation on the market. We got the answer today—yes, it is—when Amazon announced it was investing $4 billion more into Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup that appears to be OpenAI’s closest rival. (The Information’s Anissa Gardizy scooped early word of the deal).

To understand the M&A-capex nexus, consider: This is the second $4 billion investment Amazon has made in Anthropic. Amazon will remain a minority investor, as the startup noted. (Anthropic is separately trying to raise money from other investors at a valuation of up to $40 billion.) Even so, Anthropic appears to have become Amazon’s primary AI play, just as OpenAI is Microsoft’s.