In return for the investment, AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and grant the company access to its compute infrastructure. Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in generative AI firm Anthropic, which has tried to carve out a niche in the market for artificial intelligence services by focusing on so-called constitutional AI, a system designed to reduce potential misinformation and harm caused by the technology. Amazon will initially invest $1.25 billion in the company, with the option to increase that to a total of $4 billion in the future. In February, Amazon Web Services rival Google invested $300 million in the company. Founded by former senior members of Microsoft-backed OpenAI in 2021, Anthropic is the company behind Claude, an AI assistant that the company trained on constitutional AI, in contrast to other models. Constitutional AI is a system that uses a “set of principles to make judgments about outputs,” which helps Claude to “avoid toxic or discriminatory outputs” such as helping a human engage in illegal or unethical activities, according to a blog posted by Anthropic. The company said this has enabled it to broadly create an AI system that is “helpful, honest, and harmless.” Anthropic has made some headway in the competitive market for AI services, recently scoring deals with search engine DuckDuckGo and with videoconferencing company Zoom. Anthropic released its latest Claude 2 model in July 2023, claiming it could score 76.5% on the multiple choice section of the US Bar law exam, up from 73.0% with Claude 1.3. Additionally, Anthropic said that Claude 2 is harder to prompt to produce offensive or dangerous output. “The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop the most reliable and high-performing foundation models in the industry,” Anthropic said in a statement announcing the news. “AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment.” Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build on top of Anthropic’s models via Amazon Bedrock, the company said, adding that this will enable organizations to incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work and existing applications. Amazon Bedrock, is a foundation model API service that allows small companies who lack the necessary people power to develop their own LLMs to access pre-trained models, including those built by AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI. Earlier this month, Amazon announced it would be launching a new generative AI tool that creates copy listings for users selling items on the company’s e-commerce platform. The new generative AI tool is powered by a large language model (LLM) that Amazon has been developing internally and contained “a couple of hundred million endpoints.” Related content news Businesses lack AI strategy despite employee interest — Microsoft survey Microsoft’s fourth annual Work Trend Index survey shows that workers are coming to grips with generative AI tools, but leaders aren’t convinced they have a proper deployment strategy in place. By Matthew Finnegan May 08, 2024 6 mins Microsoft Generative AI IT Skills news analysis Apple Silicon sets scene for a new AI ecosystem With its new iPads, Apple presses home the message that Apple Silicon is built for AI. By Jonny Evans May 08, 2024 12 mins Apple Generative AI iPad news The CHIPS Act money: A timeline of grants to chipmakers The Department of Commerce is divvying up $52 billion in the hopes of spurring on-shore chip manufacturing in the US. Here's what's been allocated and where the money is going. By Lucas Mearian May 08, 2024 5 mins CPUs and Processors Government Manufacturing Industry reviews Arc browser for Windows — better than Chrome? This might just be the best web browser for power users. But you’ll have to rewire your brain. By Chris Hoffman May 08, 2024 13 mins Windows Browsers Productivity Software Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe