Amazon spends $2.75 billion on AI startup Anthropic in its largest venture investment yet

cnbc.com:

Amazon is making its largest outside investment in its three-decade history as it looks to gain an edge in the artificial intelligence race. 

The tech giant said it will spend another $2.75 billion backing Anthropic, a San Francisco-based startup that's widely viewed as a frontrunner in generative artificial intelligence. Its foundation model and chatbot Claude competes with OpenAI and ChatGPT.

The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September, and said at the time that Amazon would invest up to $4 billion. Wednesday's news marks Amazon's second tranche of that funding.

Amazon will maintain a minority stake in the company and won't have an Anthropic board seat, the company said. The deal was struck at the AI startup's last valuation, which was $18.4 billion, according to a source. 

Over the past year, Anthropic closed five different funding deals worth about $7.3 billion — and with the new Amazon investment, the total exceeds $10 billion. The company's product directly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds, and it was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives and employees.

News of the Amazon investment comes weeks after Anthropic debuted Claude 3, its newest suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet. The company said the most capable of its new models outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate level knowledge, graduate level reasoning and basic mathematics.

«Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers' experiences, and look forward to what's next,»