What Amazon’s Anthropic Update Doesn’t Tell Us

You could hear a pin drop in the tech world today, things were so quiet. (Are techies off painting Easter eggs?) We’re so starved for news that we appreciated Amazon’s decision to “update” everyone on the status of its commitment to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. The update was…Amazon has completed the full investment. After putting in an initial $1.25 billion last September, it has now injected another $2.75 billion into Anthropic. Normally this kind of two-part investment would only be interesting if a company abandoned the second part, but hey, we’ll take it on a slow news day. 

With today’s announcement, Amazon presumably wanted to remind us that it is not standing idly by and letting Microsoft and Google run away with AI. Of course, Google has also invested in Anthropic, to the tune of “up to $2 billion”. Both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud have recently announced the availability of Anthropic’s Claude 3 large language model on their platforms. Both claim to be Anthropic’s cloud provider—Google has called itself Anthropic’s “preferred cloud provider,” while AWS says it is Anthropic’s “primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads.” We’d call it a draw, although Amazon has referred to both stages of its Anthropic news as signs of a deepened commitment between the companies, so perhaps it thinks it has the jump on Google.