Amazon Reportedly Mulling New Multibillion-Dollar Anthropic Investment

Amazon is reportedly considering adding to its $8 billion investment in Anthropic.

The tech giant has discussed the idea of a new, multibillion dollar injection into the artificial intelligence (AI) model builder, the Financial Times (FT) reported Thursday (July 10), citing multiple sources with knowledge of the talks.

This deal would deepen a partnership that has become crucial to the futures of Amazon and Anthropic, the report added, citing interviews with executives, board members and investors for both companies.

The FT notes that the investment would cement Amazon as one of Anthropic’s biggest shareholders, ahead of Google, which has also invested more than $3 billion. It would also cushion the company against a similar partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.

A spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment beyond this article when contacted Thursday by PYMNTS, and cited the company’s “longstanding policy of not commenting on rumors and speculation” in reference to the notion of Amazon making further investments in Anthropic.

The new funding, the FT report added, would also deepen ties between the companies as they work on one of the world’s largest data center projects and collaborate on sales of Anthropic’s technology to Amazon’s cloud computing customers.

“We quickly realised that we had many shared goals that were fundamentally critical,” Dan Grossman, vice-president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon, told the FT. “The size of the [existing investment] represents our ambition.”

The FT report also argues the strategy of close alignment presents risks. Microsoft’s $14 billion OpenAI investment helped those companies gain an early advantage in the commercialization of AI products, but that relationship is now strained as the latter company seeks to move from a non-profit to a for-profit model.

In other Amazon news, PYMNTS wrote recently about the company’s AI and other tech efforts in its ongoing competition with Walmart.

“Amazon’s DNA is rooted in platform thinking: build once, scale infinitely. It owns the tech stack, the cloud infrastructure, and increasingly, the means of distribution,” that report said. “Its retail business is a flywheel powered by Prime, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Marketplace and now artificial intelligence.”

For its part, Walmart is playing to its traditional strengths while aggressively modernizing, upgrading its headquarters to reflect a more tech-forward culture that can bolster new data science, eCommerce and omnichannel retail initiatives.

“Both companies are converging on the same outcome: frictionless commerce. Yet, the pathways they take — one engineered from code and the other from community presence — highlight the strategic diversity in retail,” the report added.

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