Google has made a massive $2 billion USD investment in Anthropic, an AI startup that is quickly emerging as a chief rival to leading chatbot creator OpenAI.
The tech giant initially sank $500 million into Anthropic upfront, with an additional $1.5 billion committed over an unspecified period of time, The Wall Street Journal first reported. This comes on the heels of a previous $550 million cash infusion from Google into Anthropic’s coffers.
Anthropic has attracted no shortage of blue-chip backers and partners amid the buzz around generative AI. Last month, Amazon funneled $4 billion into the company while also naming it the primary cloud provider for Anthropic’s operations. Salesforce and Zoom are also major investors in the chatbot creator.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic made a splash earlier this year with the release of its Claude chatbot. Claude directly takes on OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, which has captivated mainstream interest in generative AI.
While ChatGPT garnered attention for its conversational abilities, Claude has won praise for its focus on reliability over providing responses that may contain inaccuracies. Claude will plainly state if it does not know the answer to a question, contrasting it from ChatGPT’s propensity to guess.
Claude recently unveiled new summarization powers that allow it to distill down large swaths of text into condensed memos, letters and narratives. This adds another weapon to its arsenal as it clashes with OpenAI in the red-hot AI chatbot wars.
With titans like Google, Amazon and Salesforce in its corner – and an apparent edge in trustworthiness over ChatGPT – Claude seems primed to take a big bite out of OpenAI’s market share. But the battle for AI supremacy is still in its early stages.
