Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic and gain a minority ownership position in the company, part of a deal that will have Amazon Web Services (AWS) become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider. Anthropic will make its future AI foundation models accessible to million of developers, as well as provide AWS customers with early access to model customization features that use its proprietary data and fine-tuning capabilities, via Amazon Bedrock.
“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon in a statement.
Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI foundation model, will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, and the two companies also will collaborate in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
Representatives from both Amazon and Anthropic met with President Biden in July 2023 to affirm their commitment to more responsible uses of AI. The White House is reportedly planning to include a provision in an upcoming executive order that would require cloud companies to report some information about their customers to the U.S. government. The provision would direct the Commerce Department to write rules forcing companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon to disclose when a customer purchases computing resources beyond a certain threshold, according to Semafor.
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These types of “know-your-customer” policies, similar to regulations in the banking industry requiring reporting of cash transactions exceeding $10,000, would be intended to create a system to allow the government to identify potential AI threats ahead of time, particularly those coming from entities in foreign countries.
