Earlier this year, Microsoft and OpenAI announced that they were expanding their partnership with a “multi-year, multi-billion dollar” investment. Microsoft hasn’t said exactly how much money it’s investing in OpenAI, but previous claims put it at around $10 billion.

Today, Amazon invest $4 billion in AI safety startup Anthropic as part of a new partnership. As part of the deal, Amazon will initially take a minority stake in Anthropic for $1.25 billion, with an option to increase the total investment to $4 billion.

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research company known for its conversational AI model, Claude. The startup had in the past raised $2.7 billion from investors, including Google and Spark Capital. With Amazon’s investment, Anthropic now has significant funding to develop more advanced AI models.

As part of the partnership, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for critical workloads such as safety research and modeling. Anthropic will leverage AWS services such as Trainium accelerator chips for AI training and Inferentia chips for deployment. The companies said this infrastructure will allow Anthropic to responsibly expand its technology. AWS users will have access to Anthropic’s models through its managed service, Amazon Bedrock.

AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading computing infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for training and deploying models.

Amazon believes the partnership will improve customer experiences through expanded AI capabilities. Andy Jesse, CEO of Amazon, said that customers are excited about new services like Amazon Bedrock and the collaboration should provide even more value.

Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that allows companies to use different bedrock models to build AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get Even more valuable than these two abilities.

Meanwhile, in July, four leading AI technology companies, including Microsoft and Anthropic, joined forces to form the Frontier Model Forum. The group’s goal is to ensure the “safe and responsible development” of generative AI.