Amazon invested another $4 billion into Anthropic as it continued to pour more resources into the AI sector to better compete against Microsoft and Google.  

The fresh funding brings the tech giant’s total investment into Anthropic to $8 billion, while maintaining its position as a minority investor.

Announced alongside the investment Anthropic extended its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is now the primary cloud and training partner for its AI models.

“By combining Anthropic’s expertise in frontier AI systems with AWS’s world-class infrastructure, we’re building a secure, enterprise-ready platform that gives organisations of all sizes access to the forefront of AI technology,” Anthropic stated.

Anthropic launched AI assistant Claude after being founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives.

Alphabet-owned Google owns a ten per cent stake in Anthropic after it made a $2 billion investment in the AI startup in 2023.

It also has backing from South Korean operator SK Telecom, which in August 2023 announced equity funding worth $100 million, as part of a push to encourage AI deployments in telecoms.

Last week, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) decided Google’s investment in Anthropic did not merit a full-blown investigation under merger rules. Along the same lines, the CMA cleared Amazon’s previous investment into Anthropic in September.