Photo Credit: Amazon
On Friday, Amazon announced it has invested $4 billion more into genAI startup Anthropic. This new funding round brings its total investment in the company to over $8 billion yet maintains its position as a minority investor.
Amazon says Anthropic is working closely with Annapurna Labs at AWS on the development and optimization of future generations of Trainium accelerators to advance the capabilities of specialized machine learning hardware. The deep technical collaboration allows the duo to write low-level kernels to directly interface with Trainium silicon, contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium.
Through Amazon Bedrock, Claude has become core infrastructure for tens of thousands of companies seeking reliable, practical AI solutions. Pfizer uses the latest Claude models in Amazon Bedrock to accelerate research and delivery timelines for critical medicines, while saving tens of millions in operational costs. Intuit uses Claude to explain complex tax calculations for millions of users during tax season.
Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, delivers more accurate responses at twice the speed by using Claude in Amazon Bedrock. The European Parliament uses Claude to power ‘Archibot,’ making 2.1 million official documents instantly searchable and easier to analyze in multiple languages while reducing research time by 80%.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is engaged in a legal battle against Universal Music Publishing Group for what constitutes ‘fair use’ among AI training models. Anthropic asked the courts to dismiss three of the four counts in a case brought in August 2024 by UMPG, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO.
Anthropic has sought to dismiss the ‘contributory’ copyright infringement, ‘vicarious’ copyright infringement, and ‘removal or alteration of copyright management information’ (a violation of the DMCA)—leaving in place the single direct copyright infringement claim.
Music publishers argue Anthropic has committed copyright infringement by training Claude on a vast amount of copyrighted music and lyrics without permission. Anthropic says it has used the materials in a manner that falls under the ‘fair use’ exemption in U.S. copyright law.
