Amazon said on Wednesday that it had added $2.75 billion to its investment in Anthropic, a start-up that competes with companies like OpenAI and Google in the race to build cutting-edge A.I. systems.
Six months ago, Amazon invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic, making the San Francisco start-up Amazon’s most important A.I. partner. Amazon said at the time that it had the option to bring its total investment to $4 billion. It had until the end of March to do so, according to financial filings.
Still, the additional investment shows the enormous resources that tech companies are pouring into A.I. and is indicative of how much financial support Anthropic needs to keep pace with its peers.
“We believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” Swami Sivasubramanian, an Amazon executive, said in a blog post announcing the investment.
While Anthropic gets closer to Amazon, it has shed a bulk of the holdings of a controversial investor. Last week, a federal judge granted approval for the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX to sell its stake in Anthropic. In 2021, FTX invested $500 million in the A.I. start-up, making up a stake of about 8 percent.
The value of that investment has since ballooned. Anthropic’s valuation tripled to $15 billion in just a year, The New York Times reported in February.
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