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Google is following in Amazon’s footsteps and has committed $2 billion to the AI startup Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon committed to investing up to $4 billion in the startup in September, a move that gave it minority ownership of the company.
Google already invested $500 million in the company earlier this year.
Anthropic is a rival to OpenAI, the creator of popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. While the investment is certainly a large one, Anthropic also signed up for a multiyear deal with Google Cloud worth $3 billion, so that money will flow back to Google over the next few years.
The investment comes as many tech giants are throwing money at AI companies to better position themselves for the future; OpenAI and Anthropic are the largest companies in the space.
Microsoft currently has a 49% stake in OpenAI after adding $10 billion in January to the $3 billion it had already invested in the company.
Anthropic’s founders were originally part of OpenAI but left the company after a dispute over how to safely develop artificial intelligence, the Journal notes.
All that money is necessary to help train the company’s products. AI is expensive to both train and run. TechCrunch notes that internal documents from Anthropic suggest the company needs to spend $1 billion by the end of next year to build its next-generation AI model, Claude-Next.