Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon announced today that it’s pumping another $4 billion into Claude AI maker Anthropic, bringing its total funding amount to $8 billion. This latest round follows $1.25 billion last September and another $2.75 billion in March.
Along with the money, Amazon wrote in its blog post that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be named Anthropic’s “primary training partner” and that the OpenAI rival would use Trainium and Inferentia chips for future models.
The investment and deeper partnership align with previous reporting by Reuters that Claude will power Amazon’s new Alexa voice assistant. The improved Alexa — the release of which has been delayed — reportedly performed better with Claude than it did when using Amazon’s in-house model. The…